On Thursday April 30th 2026, Yale University changed its mission statement from language that included "improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community,” to “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”
Shabtai, the global Jewish Leadership Society based at Yale stands as the spiritual and intellectual communal vanguard of freedom of expression and discourse at the Ivy League. Shabtai improves the world by educating aspiring leaders through its ethical, interdependent, and diverse programing.
In this spirit, Kellner Academy is honored to release a personal talk given by Professor Nicholas Christakis at the Anderson Mansion on April 3rd 2024. Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, and director of the Human Nature Lab. He is also the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.
My Life Speech
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Matthew Kaspy: Okay, thank you all for your thoughtful responses and introductions. So without further ado, I'll introduce our speaker for tonight. Nicholas Christakis is a social scientist and physician at Yale University who conducts research in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. His current work focuses on how human biology and health affect and are affected by social interactions and social networks. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Natural Science, appointed in the departments of sociology, medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Biomedical Engineering, and the School of Management. Doctor Christakis received his BS from Yale in 1984, his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1989, and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. One body of work in his lab focuses on how health and health behavior in one person can influence analogous outcomes in a person's social network. This work involves the application of statistical and mathematical models to understand the dynamics of diverse phenomena in longitudinally evolving networks. A related body of work uses experiments to examine the spread of altruism, emotions, and health behaviors along network connections online and offline, including with large scale field trials in the developing world directed at improving public health, example in Honduras and India.
Matthew Kaspy: His lab has also examined the genetic and evolutionary determinants of social network structure, showing that social interactions have shaped our genome with related projects that have mapped networks of populations in Tanzania and Sudan who live as all humans did 10,000 years ago. His most recent work has used artificial intelligence agents bots to affect social processes online. Doctor Christakis is the author of over 200 articles and several books. His influential book connected the surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives, documented how social networks affect our lives, and was translated into 20 foreign languages. His most recent book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, was published in March 2019 and is slated to appear in German, Chinese, Dutch and Greek and other languages. In 2009, Christakis was named by Time magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009 and 2010, he was listed by Foreign Policy magazine in their annual list of top 100 Global Thinkers. Ladies and gentlemen, Nicholas Christakis.
Nicholas Christakis: Thank you so much for having me to this group of people whose variety was very impressive and interesting to me in this wonderful setting, and I had a nice time already talking with Shmully, who I took an instant liking to. And by the way, that's an interesting topic in itself. Why? What are the evolutionary origins of like at first sight? It's not hard to construct an argument for why we're capable of love at first sight. When I say that, I mean reciprocated love at first sight, not the kind of infatuation many of us had in high school where we were in love with someone and they had no idea who we were. No, I'm talking about love at first sight, where you fall in love with someone and they fall in love with you, which is uncommon human experience. It's not required for a happy marriage although it often foretells it. But it's not hard to construct an evolutionary argument for why we might evolve the capacity for love at first sight. That is to say, the capacity to identify a mate that would enhance our survival and the survival of our children. So that phenotype, that ability that we have to have love at first sight, which is uncommon, but which does exist, it's not hard to construct an argument for why you would be able to discern, oh, this is a person I should reproduce with because our children are more likely to survive.
Nicholas Christakis: However, we also have the capacity for like at first sight, which all of us have had that experience. And why? Why do we have the capacity for like at first sight? That's a very unusual phenotype that we have. When you meet someone and you instantly like them. Usually that foretells a good it's not perfectly predictive. All of us have had the experience of really liking someone and then later on concluding, what a jerk they are. And we've all had the experience of thinking that guy is a real jerk. And then later, you know, I came to like you. But we have this capacity, and so why is that? Well, it's very interesting why we we evolve the capacity for friendship. The definition of friendship, the one we've advanced or that's in the book blueprint. By the way, I have a more recent book called Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. But we evolved the capacity for friendship, which is that we have long term non-reproductive unions with unrelated conspecifics. That's you have a friend and it's very rare in the animal kingdom. We do it. Certain other primates do it. Elephants, both Asian and African elephants do it, and certain whale species do it.
Nicholas Christakis: And that's it. Now, when you think of social connections, for example, in packs of dogs or horses, those animals are typically genetically related to each other. They're cousins, for example. But we will truly have friends with unrelated individuals and they can last a very long time. Oh, I can answer the question of how long your friendships last. Because we've studied that, too. So, why? Why would natural selection have endowed us with this very profound capacity? And in a book blueprint that Matthew mentioned, the Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, I talk about these evolved capacities we have, which are extraordinary. We have a capacity for love. We don't just have sex with each other, but we form a sentimental attachment to the people that we are having sex with. That's uncommon in the animal kingdom, that you have a long term sentimental, as far as we know, in the animals, we can't really know that attachment or particular attachment to a person. We have friendships, which is very rare, as I've said. We cooperate with each other, which is also rare. We teach each other things, which is really rare. Animals, most animals, virtually all animals can learn through what is known as independent learning or contact with the environment. A little fish can learn that if it swims up to the light, it will find food there.
Nicholas Christakis: That's called independent learning. All the experiments you guys did in high school biology with a shocking worm and it learns to avoid the electrical plate and so on. But we don't just learn by independent learning. We also learn by something called social learning. So for example, you put your hand in the fire and you learn that it burns. Now you've acquired some knowledge. Fire burns, but you've paid a price. You have a burnt hand. Or I can watch you put your hand in the fire and I acquire almost as much knowledge that fire burns and I pay none of the price. So social learning is incredibly efficient. The ability to watch others and learn from there is super efficient. And that social learning is rare in the animal kingdom. It's not, you know, many animals learn socially. We're one of them. Or for example, we go into the forest and you eat red berries and die. And I'm like, I better not eat red berries. That is a real survival advantage to be able to learn socially from other members of our other conspecifics. But we don't just learn from each other. We teach each other things. I teach you to build a fire. And this is exceptionally rare in the animal kingdom, and yet it is a fundamental part of our humanity. This and incidentally, what our university should be doing, which is another whole topic.
Nicholas Christakis: But we teach each other things. So all of these capacities, the capacity for love, the capacity for friendship, the capacity for cooperation, the capacity for teaching, these have all been shaped by our evolutionary past and are very deep in fundamental parts of our humanity and I would say our predicates or illustrations of a good society. And in the book Blueprint, I talk a little bit about, certain moral philosophy, tradition, about how we can even come to say anything is good at all, actually, which is itself a kind of interesting topic. And here I rely very much on Philippa Foot's, some of Philippa Foot's arguments. I would- hold on. What was I going to say about a good society? Oh. And so I think one of the things that's sort of really interesting is, is that you can begin if you begin to think of where our society is heading and what our societies are doing, there's an argument, I'm sure you're all familiar with, that Steven Pinker and others have advanced about how the world is getting better. And I think Steven, who's a friend of mine, is right about this. And the essential portion of the argument is that beginning with the enlightenment in the 18th century and the philosophical innovations that took place, then a kind of commitment to democracy, a commitment to reason, a commitment to science, unevenly applied and unequally applied and, you know, unevenly distributed throughout the world across time.
Nicholas Christakis: But certainly the initial commitments were well articulated and came to be applied more and more that the promulgation of those principles and the dissemination of those principles coupled with the parallel innovations in science, you know, the discoveries about electricity and magnetism and gravity and and the steam engine and all of those things that these philosophical advances and these scientific advances, starting in England, incidentally, initially and spreading around the world, have contributed to a dramatic improvement in human social welfare that we are safer, more peaceful, healthier, live longer, richer than we otherwise would have been. And I think that argument, in my view, is empirically correct. But what I have tried to do in the book Blueprint is to argue that we need not rely solely on historical forces to understand the origins of a good society. The deeper, more powerful, more ancient factors and forces are at work propelling a good society over hundreds of thousands of years, that natural selection has equipped us and has endowed us with these fundamental virtues that you all take for granted love, friendship, teaching, cooperation and so on that form or undergird a good society.
Nicholas Christakis: And so the essential argument that I would make is that the arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness. And that book was animated in part as well, by a kind of personality or moral disposition I have, which is that fundamentally, I'm an optimist to my wife is very irritated by this property and she would say that she's a realist and I'm an unnatural optimist, but I'm fundamentally optimistic about human beings, and I fundamentally marvel at us. And by the way, I should say that I'm not unaware of our capacity for great evil, right? I mean, every century is replete with horrors: the pogroms and the slavery and the torture and the violence and the warfare. You can find it everywhere. But equally we are good, actually, and I would argue that if every time I came near you, you were violent towards me, or you killed me, or you took my stuff, or you filled me with lies, that I would be better off living apart from you. We would have evolved not to be a social species. We would have evolved to live atomistically. Many species do live atomistically. We do not. To my eye, that means that the benefits of a connected life must have outweigh the costs.
Nicholas Christakis: That whatever the risks I run in assembling into a group, the benefits of that group must outweigh the costs of that group. So even though we have all of these vices, which we do, I would argue that the virtues, particularly the social virtues, surmount them. In fact, I would argue that many of the virtues that we have, not all of them, but many of them are intrinsically social virtues. So we don't care whether you love yourself or a kind to yourself or just to yourself. We care whether you love others or are kind to others or just to others. Right. These virtues are intrinsically social. Now you can have some virtues like bravery. For example, you can be brave before nature, right? In an earthquake, for instance, or facing a violent animal, for example. And bravery is a virtue, but many of our virtues are social. And again, I think there's a deep connection between our evolutionary past and our moral existence, I would argue. In fact, I see the book A blueprint as a work of evolutionary sociology, or what I would call social theodicy. So many of you are familiar with the notion of theodicy, right? How the- this is a Catholic tradition. How are we and I don't know what the Jewish tradition is on this. They have also.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, as well. Like how are we to make sense, you know, if God is is omniscient and omnipotent and beneficent- Jewish God is not quite as beneficent sometimes I think- I mean, yeah, yes, I know technically same God. I know, I know, I know, I'm joking a little. But, you know, how are we to make sense of all the evil in the world? How could such a god do this? And you know, the- and this is known as a problem of theodicy. How are we to vindicate a belief in the goodness and omnipotence of God if given the evil we see in the world? And I would argue that by analogy, you can think of sociodocy. How can we vindicate a belief and confidence in the goodness of society, given all the manifest evil and problems that we see in the world? Like this extraordinary event. So that's what I that's sort of what I tackle in Blueprint. Now, when I was invited to this event, I was desperate for guidance. And I was given a lot of, you know, we just want you to talk. It's very informal. It's a salon. And then and they're like, well, they'd like to hear about your biography. And I was like, are you sure? And there's that scene which none of you will know, but maybe Shmully will know about in In the Philadelphia Story, where Katharine Hepburn goes, we're going to talk about me.
Nicholas Christakis: Goody. And, you know, obviously, I could I could tell you a reasonably story filled and I hope interesting. I will tell you how I met my wife, which is one of my favorite stories, because she is my best friend and I'm very lucky that way. And it's what I wanted in my own marriage. And you don't need to have that, by the way. You're entitled to have different models of marriage, and you're entitled not to want your partner to be your best friend. And you get different things from your partner you get from your friends. This is all true. But in my case, she's my best friend. But, so I didn't know whether to do that, so you'll have to give me some guidance of, like, what kind of autobiography you want. And I'm happy to be disinhibited and tell you whatever you want to hear. And I also have 10 or 12 little notes about friendship that I could tell you about listening to your points so I could talk to you about friendship all you wanted. What would you like to hear about? Yeah, and we can talk a little bit about the Silliman events, although I want to say something about that. This will sound immodest, but.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: How did this happen?
Nicholas Christakis: How did what happened?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: This.
Nicholas Christakis: Well, I'll tell you about that in a minute, then. Okay. But the Silliman events.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Just we want the real. We want the real.
Nicholas Christakis: All right, I'll tell you what I can about myself. But, you know, it's very odd. And, you know, I no longer feel uncomfortable when people mention it. It's just part of my history. And I think I handled myself well. It was difficult. It was very difficult. And my wife and I, every night we talked. What should we do? What should we do? And we had to resist. It's like the Obama said, when they go low, we go high. And like every night we were trying to do that. And but I just have to say, though, and this is going to sound a little immodest. I was a reasonably famous scientist before that happened. And I think I am one of the most cited social scientists in the world. And so I kind of hate it when I'm introduced as, you know, like I was, you know, the guy who kept his cool in the courtyard with a bunch of undergraduates who just lost their noodles, you know? So, and I was able to keep my cool in the courtyard for a number of reasons. One was that, I had had martial arts training for decades. Decades. Shotokan karate, which is a magnificent style, and, Shotokan karate, a magnificent style. And I had a magnificent teacher, Kazumi Tabata, here at Yale initially, and then I trained with him afterwards when I went to medical school.
Nicholas Christakis: And that was extremely helpful. And I had been a hospice doctor taking care of people who were dying for a very long time. So I was used to high emotional intensity circumstances, and that skill was extremely helpful in that situation. I had studied something called deindividuation, which is how people become part of a mob. You know why for example, torturers will wear masks or will mask their victim to deindividuate them, or why people in those old, sort of sexually licentious balls would mask balls or sexually licentious you. You deindividuation you see yourself or how mobs come to do these incredibly violent things, they lose their moral self-identity. They see their victims not as people and themselves, not as moral actors. And I saw that happening in the courtyard, like I literally saw it happening in front of me. So I had every, every thing, so many aspects of my life were moving through my head in that moment, and I was trying to figure out what to do. Plus I had committed myself to a life as a teacher, and so I saw this as an opportunity to teach them something, which I tried to do.
Nicholas Christakis: And I think the lesson was lost on virtually everyone in the courtyard. I would say, yeah, you can see it in the videos. They didn't understand what was happening, or maybe they did, but they were like, you know, like the Cultural Revolution and we're just interested in raw power. So, you know, it's very weird for me to, you know, but it's part of my history. And so it's, it's unavoidable. And I'm and I'm happy to to talk more about that if you want. I was going to say one thing about the the hospice or the karate. Oh, the very nicest thing that was ever said to me after this. I met a very interesting man older than me. And I've been blessed to have some friends. One of my advisors, she just died. She was 93, so she was 30 years older than me and she was a friend. And I've had some male friends, mostly mentors, actually, who are 20 or 30 years older and something very nice about someone that's that much older than you, because there's not much competition in the relationship. And it's very helpful. And I met this older man in a setting I won't go into after the events, a very wealthy man.
Nicholas Christakis: And he was very curious. And I was happy to oblige him and tell him all the backstory and what the deans at Yale did and didn't do. And frankly, they didn't do very much at all. And they, you know, abrogated their duties as far as I'm concerned. And he listened to my story. And then he said to me, this was the very nicest thing anyone had said to me about these events. He said to me, this was not the first time you've been tested, is it? Ooh, extraordinary praise, wasn't it? I was so amazed when he said that to me and so grateful. Here I am telling you this ten years later. And I said to him, no, you know, you're right. It's not. And in fact, those events, bad as they were, were not even in the top five worst events of my life. So I think there's something about having faced adversity, which is maturing and growing. And I don't think you can live a life without adversity. I'm not sure you would. You might want to live a life without adversity, I don't know, but the ancient Greeks said pathei mathos, which means through suffering comes knowledge. And so that was at play in the courtyard, too, you know, like.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: That answers your first question of the night.
Nicholas Christakis: Which is what?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: How a God could have created a world. Yeah.
Nicholas Christakis: pathei mathos. Yes. That's right. And the Hindus also have a similar belief, you know, that you're sampling and the Buddhists that you're sampling multiple lives, you know, that you get to see the good and the bad, possibly.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: But without adversity we wouldn't be who we are.
Nicholas Christakis: I would say, I would say. So Shmully is pushing me for biography. I don't know where to start. Should I- I'll start in. I'll start briefly. I'll tell you just some highlights. Is that interesting to you guys? So, my parents immigrated from Greece as Fulbright Scholars in the late 50s. They were both very bright Greeks. My mother's father was. Both of my grandfathers were extraordinary men. My mother's father saw fit to educate his daughter. They were upper class. For a man of his era and his gender - he grew up in poverty - both of my grandfathers grew up in poverty when they were born, and they were both self-made men. And my mother's father immigrated from southern Greece to Istanbul, where they were the opportunities there. And they actually hung out with the Jews and the Armenians. They paid the infidel tax to the, you know, to the government and the Orthodox, the Greeks, the Armenians and the Jews and he- but he saw fit to educate his daughters, which was really unusual. And he sent my mother to the United States, which is really unusual in the 1950s. And she winds up at Vassar and through the Greek community, they are introduced and they meet and they fall in love. And I'm the issue one of the issues of that. So my parents had three children and then adopted two more later in life. And, which is I don't know how well that factored.
Nicholas Christakis: So I have a black sister and a Chinese brother. So I grew up in an interracial family as well, which, my black sister was calling me up in 2015 and saying, what the fuck is going on over there? You know, and I was like, Nora, I have no idea. You know, these people have gone crazy. But anyway, so. And my father was actually a student in- both my parents were PhD students at Yale. My father in nuclear physics and my mother in physical chemistry. And I was born in New Haven at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. I had one of those t shirts that says Yale class of 19, question mark, question mark, a little onesie as a baby. And then, you know, I don't know, 24 years, 22 years later, that came to pass. And then my parents had to return to Greece in 1967, I'm sorry, in 1965. So I was born in 1962, and my father had just gotten his PhD in nuclear physics. But because he had had military deferments, the Greek army saw fit to draft him into the army in 1965. So he was about how old would he have been? He was, I don't know, 24 or something or 25. They drafted him to the Army. He has a PhD in nuclear physics from Yale. This is 1965. And they decide the Greek army in its infinite wisdom. How should we deploy this man? And they decide simply because he could read or write, they would make him a dentist's assistant.
Nicholas Christakis: So my father's military service was. Can you imagine a Greek army dentist in the 1960s? I mean, it must have been awful. And anyway, his job was to hold down the other soldiers while they were being dealt with by this Greek dentist. Anyway, they were there for a few years, and they returned to the United States in 68. I come back in 68. I don't speak any English. I only speak Greek. In the interval, my other two children, my other two siblings have been born, and my mother is diagnosed with a terminal illness in 1968, when I'm six. She was 25 at the time, so she had what was now a more treatable disease, but was then a fatal disease. So she had Hodgkin's disease, stage four B nodular sclerosis type. And we were sent to say our goodbyes to her. And Vince DeVita, who was at Yale, eventually had just invented mopp, this chemotherapy treatment. And her doctor had heard about it and gave her a partial regimen, and she miraculously had a seven year remission. She eventually dies when I'm 25 and she's 47, and she was one of the most extraordinary human beings I've ever met in my life. In fact, I think my going into hospice medicine was a counterphobic reaction to growing, it clearly was, to growing up in a family where I was just constantly worried that my mother was going to die any day.
Nicholas Christakis: She was going to die. So I grew up with this uncertainty, with this sword of Damocles over my head. And my first body of work was on prognostication, how doctors make predictions. Because I grew up obsessed with predicting how long would she live? And the, so she gets this remission. So I grew up in this household with an extraordinary human being. She's the kind of person who would would get chemotherapy and come home and bake for us, her children, her three little children. She would cook for us and then go upstairs and vomit for the rest of the evening, you know, just just extraordinary and brave like a samurai before death. I mean, I've never met a more fearless person in front of death, and I spent I took care of thousands of people who were dying later in my career. And I was at the bedside of hundreds when they died, like I witnessed at least 2 or 300 deaths. And I never met except one woman I met who was reminded me of my mother, a woman dying of scleroderma at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s. She was extraordinary. And I'm sure part of my going into hospice medicine was to see, well, who else was like that? So my mother was fearless in the face of death, didn't want to die, but extraordinarily unafraid.
Nicholas Christakis: And I remember asking her how this was possible when I was. By then I was in medical school at Harvard Medical School. And she says, what you don't understand, Nicholas, is that you're young and healthy, and a dying person wants to die like a sleepy person wants to sleep. Imagine you're just exhausted and all you want to do is go to bed. That's how I feel. So, fearless like a samurai. Very wise, very loving. I miss her still. And anyway, that's how I grew up. And then when I was 16, my father, as was typical of men of his ethnic background and as typical of the 70s, left our family, left our household. He was a brilliant man. I have good relationships with him now, but, you know, it was not very helpful. So at the age of 16, I was sort of the oldest sibling and had a lot of responsibility for helping my younger siblings. In the interval my older brother Quanyon had been adopted and is now a very famous surgeon at UCSF. He's the vice chief of surgery there. He's a famous endocrine surgeon. And but he had gone also he went to Yale. He had left the house by then, by the time I was 16, because he's eight years older than me and then I come to Yale at the age of- I just turned 17, because when we came back from Greece, I skipped a year. And this was- I was very nerdy and brainy and very interested in self-improvement from a young age.
Nicholas Christakis: And I was very interested in science, and I was very interested in, but my initial love was linguistics because I was interested in semiotics. I came to Yale and I wanted to be a- I wanted to study semiotics. I wanted to study linguistics, but, and I took some classes. In fact, I was telling Danielle and Matthew when we came over here, my professor was Leopold Pospichal, who had the house next door. And I remember once coming to to his house and being very smitten with a graduate student who was one of his graduate students, who had this extraordinary she had swishy skirts and silver bracelets. And I was this like 18 year old Dweeby kid. She was a grown woman, you know, she had you know, she had no interest in me, of course, but, anyway, so I wanted to do that, but I was afraid, you know, I was afraid to study that. And I knew I wanted to go to medical school because all my mother's sons became doctors. Every single one of the three of us became doctors. And so, and what was very interesting to me about that, and I tell a lot of my students now, is that when you are a Yale undergrad, if you say there are certain things you can say you want to do and nobody questions you. So if you say, I want to go to medical school, well, that's great.
Nicholas Christakis: And if you get into Harvard Medical School, people say, good for you. Right. Of course. Or if you say, I want to do Teach for America, oh, that's great, or work at Goldman Sachs, that's great. Or McKinsey. That's great. Right. There are these like, you know, hi. But that's so stupid, right. I never questioned why I wanted to- I was it was again a counter. It was like a, you know, addressing my past. I was a prisoner to my past and I was, you know, there's nothing wrong about being a doctor. I have a good. I'll come to that in a moment. But nobody stopped me to say, why are you becoming a doctor? Are you sure you want to be a doctor? Right. I mean, nobody, nobody. Not a single person. So because I wanted to be a doctor, I had to. I sort of abandoned my interest in linguistics and very timidly did biology instead. And I majored in biology, and I went on to medical school. And then my mother was then dying the second year of my medical school. And so I decided to- finally was dying. And she was 47, I was 25. And I decided I had taken actually a year off in college, believe it or not, to go work in a French virology lab where I studied coronavirus. It's another whole story. I can tell you later how that. So I spent a year in France.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Wasn't a Chinese lab.
Nicholas Christakis: No it wasn't, no, it was not. And there was no escape of the coronavirus when we were there. We had very good, very good behavior. Actually, I'll tell you, just as a digression on that story and help me come back to my main story. So at the time there was no internet, so there was no real way to figure out who was who. And I was working at the marine biology lab at Woods Hole in a cellular neuroanatomy lab at the time, with a very wonderful scientist by the name of Tom Reese. And I was working as a darkroom technician. That was my day job, like earning my pay by being a darkroom technician. But in the night we would do experiments, and we worked 80 or 90 or 100 hours a week. I mean, the machines, these multi-million dollar machines, these electron microscopes and these freeze fracture devices were in operation 24 hours a day. You would sign up for a microscope time at two in the morning. So we were doing these experiments all the time. And I was desperate to get a job. I wanted to take a year off from college. And through serendipity, I met this French virologist because he was visiting some neighbors of ours from the home where I grew up in. And he said, oh, we'll hire you. And the reason he wanted to hire me was because I spoke English, and they wanted help in translating their papers. That was the only marketable skill I had at the age of 20 is that I spoke English. And that's actually still true of most of the undergrads or anyone. I mean, when you're 20, I mean, you know, they're very smart, but I mean, Jesus, they can't do anything or very rarely can.
Nicholas Christakis: And so finally, the job offer comes from this guy, and I get the letter when I was at Woods Hole on Cape Cod and my postdoc advisor, I was 20, he was 30 says, well, let's go look this guy up. George Perry was his name. So we go to the library because there was no internet and did a literature search and pulled the guy's papers off. And he was studying rotavirus and coronavirus. He was studying all these viruses that are enzootic, that live in animals in their guts and then can spread to humans. And then we're reading the papers and in the papers, it says research assistants were dispatched to the streets of Paris to collect dog feces from the streets, which was a big problem back then and less so now. And bring them back to the lab where they were processed in this way and we extracted the coronavirus and so on. And so my postdoc said to me, this is going to be your job, not translating English, but collecting dog shit on the streets of Paris. And he was right. When I got to Paris, they gave me these little titanium pooper scooper and and they said, okay, now go out. This was at the Hopital Saint-Louis in the, in the 12th arrondissement. And they said, go out and collect the poop and bring it back to the lab. And here's how you process it when you bring it back. Honest to God. And I did that and other things too. Anyway.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Did you have to?
Nicholas Christakis: No, I didn't.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Make sure it was dog poop. Not.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, exactly. You could see. Yes, exactly. Anyway, so this was a digression going back. Oh. So I took a year off in medical school as well to get my MPH. I thought, I can't care for my mother who's dying if I'm doing clinical rotations. So I should take a break and do a master of public health degree, which is much easier, much controllable. So I took that year off thinking that I would be flying back and forth from DC, but my mother wound up dying in September. We had all the children had gone home and she said, I haven't told this story before, but I'll tell it now. We were all sitting in her room. She was about to die. It was like, we didn't know this, but she was 2 or 3 weeks out from death. It was like early September. She died in the third week of September. And she looked at us and she said, she goes, it's time for me to die. She goes, you children need to go back to school. Can you imagine? She was right, of course. And she didn't have much long to live anyway. And she did. She died like, two weeks later. And my sister Katrina and my brother Dimitri and I and Quanyon, who had come in, he was a surgeon then at UCSF.
Nicholas Christakis: We all went back to our work anyway, I went. So I had taken the year off to do my MPH, but I didn't need it because she died in September. But it was during that year, partly, I think, disinhibited by her death and maybe ennobled a little bit. Or not ennobled, but encouraged or set free a little bit by it. I sort of rediscovered my interest in the social sciences because I was taking an MPH degree. We were studying biostatistics. We were studying human behavior. We were studying all of these ideas. And I was like, you know, I like this stuff. And why don't I do this instead of what I was planning to do. In the interval I had met my wife, who, and I'll tell you the story because it's one of my favorite stories, and I've told this story before. But the thing you need to know about my beloved Erika is that she has a bona fide psychiatric disorder, which she is afraid of snakes. It's like a phobia. And so some of you probably have phobias of heights or snakes or caves or whatever you have, or, you know, whatever. And that's a general anxiety disorder. It has a partially genetic basis. It's actually extremely treatable. It's the only psychiatric condition that you can be cured of basically through exposure therapy.
Guest: Snakes in particular?
Nicholas Christakis: No all of them. So heights, snakes, all of them. All of the phobias are a subcategory of anxiety disorders and = you can be cured of those things. If you have fear of flying, for example, I have friends that have gone through the treatment where you know, they first they put you in a fake plane that's in a room like this, and then they slowly get you exposed to it, and then they fly with you and so on, and you get over it. Anyway, Erika had a bonafide fear of snakes, and after she had graduated from Harvard. I didn't know her at the time as an undergrad, and she had gone to Bangladesh to work in a women's health development project in the deep back country of Bangladesh in a place called Proshika. And and there she met a woman who, Benijelon, who was her roommate in Bangladesh and these two young girls fresh out of college, idealistic or trying to help, you know, reduce wife beating and improve the economic circumstances of women in this part of the world. Benny was the girlfriend of my best friend from high school, who was this Iranian dude by the name of Nasrallah Sami. So Nasrallah and I went way back. It was one of my oldest friends. And Benny is there with Erika. And so Benny had met me. And then one day she says, Erika, I just thought of the man you're going to marry.
Nicholas Christakis: And Erika said, what the hell are you talking about? You know, he's 10,000 miles away. He's this Greek guy called Niko. He sounds sleazy. He wants he wants to be a doctor. And my father was a doctor. And I'm not interested in doctors. You know, I'm going to marry a war correspondent or, you know, like a wildlife photographer or some, you know, action hero guy. And you know, someone like that, not like, you know, a Greek American doctor named Niko. And so Benny says, you know, he's a nice guy. Just wait. I'll introduce you when we get back. And so they came back at the end of their year to Washington, D.C., where, of course, I had grown up and so Naasiy and Benny contrived to introduce us one day. And Naasiy lived in this big intergenerational Iranian household with his parents and his older sisters and their children. So there were nieces and nephews and grandparents and all these people living under this big household. And the day comes when I'm supposed to go over there and I knew this house. And I ring the doorbell and I open the door and Erika, I come in that door where it says exit. And Erika is right here having some kind of spirited argument with Benny about some feminist philosophy issue. And I take one look at her and I was like, like lightning.
Nicholas Christakis: I was like, oh my God, this woman, I'm in love with her. Like, like just instantly like I was like. And later she took a bit longer, but not much longer. So I walk in and now the like the three, like the four 25 year olds are just chatting about stuff. My mother, meanwhile, was about to die. Like I met Erika in the middle of July, so my mother was two months from death. I was very raw from all this experience. And so the 25 year olds are chatting and I'm on my best behaviour now. Like, I'm on notice, like I want to impress this woman and the little cousins, Naasiy's, nieces and nephews who are like 10 and 12, you know, they were like, you know, kind of chatting with us. And I wanted to show Erika that I'm like, good father material. So like, I'm like talking to the kids, you know, and like I'm deploying all my geology knowledge. The kid was interested in rocks, and I'm like, you know, okay, I can do this. You know, I remember, you know, quartz crystals and the Mohs hardness scale. And, you know, I can talk about all of this stuff and at some point, the kids ask us to go upstairs to their room to see their room where they had like a little cabinet of curiosities, you know, the little children will have a collection, and the four of us go upstairs and Benny and Erika are standing at the door, and Naasiy and I go, the two kids to this shelf, and there's all this stuff there.
Nicholas Christakis: And one of them was this, like snakeskin and I'm like, pulling out my reptile knowledge now. I'm like, how can I talk to this kid about, you know, how snakes shed their skin. And what do we know about the Fibonacci sequence and the tale of the skin? And, you know, I'm, like, pulling off the tail of the snake and the skin and all of this stuff, and I'm trying to and I'm just about. And the kid pulls the snakeskin off the shelf and is about to hand it to me and Erika, that I had just met like two hours earlier, she- no, no, she blurts from the door. She goes, if you touch that snake skin, you'll never touch me. I was like, yes, she likes me, you know, like I was like. And then I was like, well, snakeskin, this is a difficult decision, you know? I don't know what I'm going to do. And that was it because I knew she liked me, you know? And anyway, that's how I met Erika when I was 25. And then we fell in love very quickly. And, you know, it took us a while to get married, but that's irrelevant.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The irony is that her phobia brought you together.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes, exactly. Actually. Well, at least it alerted me to her interest in me, which was because I'm such a dork was not apparent to me before then. Anyway, so then I. So then during that year, I discovered I rediscovered my interest in the social sciences. I also decided that I didn't- I wanted to be a research scientist, and I had come to learn something which is still true, which is that the days when you could get graduate training in medicine, and that was enough to be a researcher, had passed in the 60s, like, you really need a PhD degree, so you need to be trained in science. And now you could be a clinician scientist. You know, you could do clinical research if you're a professor of ophthalmology or internal medicine or infectious disease, you know, you can do clinical studies of like drugs, for example, but you can't do like bench science or original science or discovery based science, I would say. So I needed to get a PhD, and I didn't know what to do it in and through a series of serendipitous events I don't think I'll go into, although there are some stories there too. I chose sociology, which is a low status field, and was then, and it still is.
Nicholas Christakis: And I can tell you a funny Larry Summer story. If you remind me, I'll come back to it about who I count as a friend, Larry. But anyway, so I about sociology, I can tell you later. But anyway, so I picked sociology and working with this woman, Renee Fox. This was at the University of Pennsylvania, and I went there for my PhD. I had to do my clinical training. I did my residency, my fellowship in internal medicine, and my PhD in six years. So I was able to double count a few of those things and get all that done. And finally, by the age of 33, I had finished my formal education and I got my first job at the University of Chicago, which is still to this day, my favorite university in the world. And I would send my children there. I would take a job there again if they offered it, you know, I would, you know, it's just an astonishing university. And I went there as an assistant professor at the age of 33 in 1995. And then in 2001 I moved to Harvard, which was well, it was fascinating to me how that decision came about.
Nicholas Christakis: And we can talk about that if you want too. But that was partly driven by the fact that if there was any place that I would have left Chicago for, it would have been Harvard, and my kids were the right age, and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse, basically. And I look back on that, and I'm not 100% sure. I mean, you know, that led to other serendipity where I ran into, well, I should do some of my intellectual autobiography I had. While I was at Chicago, I was studying, I was taking care of hospice patients because I was a hospice doctor. And in my lab I was studying death related phenomena. So I was studying the care of the terminally ill. I was studying optimal performance of ICUs. I was end of optimal end of life care. I was studying determinants of hospice care. I was studying the widowhood effect, which is dying of a broken heart, or the increased probability of the recently bereaved to die. And I was getting depressed and my wife was like, you need to study something else. And I basically decided to study marriage and that's and that's how I started.
Inaudible.
Nicholas Christakis: Exactly, exactly. But I actually marriage was a big step up from studying death. And I and I started and I started studying. Yeah, exactly.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Taxes.
Nicholas Christakis: Taxes. Yes, exactly. There's this old joke. You know, a guy says, you know, goes into the doctor and he's terminally ill and he's dying, and and the doctor examines him and then says, you know, I have some bad news. And the patient says, what is the what is it? And he goes, well, you're you're going to die in six months. And the patient says, oh my God, doctor, it's awful. What should I do? And he says, well, you know, get married and move to Cleveland. And the patient says, why? And he goes, well, you'll only live six months, but it'll feel like 20 years. Anyway, it's a stupid old joke, but this is the joke that hospice doctors tell. Anyway, actually, another joke that hospice doctors tell is actually, this is hospice nurses tell this joke. What's the function of nails in a coffin? To keep the doctors from administering more chemotherapy. Oh, God. Anyway, he says this is old stuff I'm pulling out. So. But I was studying the widowhood effect, and this was actually changed my life because in the 1990s, I had this experience. I talk about this in one of my Ted Talks, where I was taking care of this old woman who was dying of dementia, and she was being cared for by her daughter. And I had this sort of sudden realization that the widowhood effect, which is the fact that death spreads from me to you to my spouse, actually is a simple case of a much broader and more complex phenomenon that these effects were not limited to death, and they weren't limited to dyads, that you could have broader spreading processes in networks.
Nicholas Christakis: And that totally changed my life. But then I went to Harvard, and I was casting about for a way to to study this more generally. And this led me to the Framingham Heart Study and then led me to the 2007 paper we did on obesity, which also changed my life. And I can tell you about that if you're interested. And then I was at Harvard from 2001. I arrived my first day of work was 9/11, which there's also some interesting stories there. And then I was there for 12 years until 2013 when I was having a real hard time getting Harvard to give me the resources I needed for the kind of science I wanted to do and to make the very long story short, Yale made me an offer I couldn't refuse to give me the resources I needed. I needed wet lab space. I needed different kinds of resources than I was getting at Harvard. So I made the fateful decision to move to Yale. And we came with a big heart and with a real interest, both me and my wife, and persuaded that we could make a difference at this institution and help advance its science, help advance its values.
Nicholas Christakis: We moved into in a house. We bought a house in Hamden. I had been the master at Pforzheimer House, one of the houses at Harvard, similar to our colleges here. My wife and I had served there and liked it, being masters, and Peter Salovey offered us to be masters here. This is not widely known, offered us- this fact is not known by anyone. We were offered to be masters when we moved and we said no, we'd done that. We didn't want to do it. And then the next year he said, would you like to be masters? I think there was an opening at Morse and and we said no. And then the third year he said, okay, we have four openings. Could you please help us out? You'd be great candidates to be masters at Silliman. And my wife and I finally relented. And we had other things going on in our own life. The house that we had in Hamden wasn't exactly to our liking. We said, why don't we try it? We'd done it before, which was a really bad mistake, as it turned out. Couldn't tell. The other thing which comes back to friendship, which I did not factor in, it was so stupid of me. And I'm going to mention this because it's important. I had been at Harvard for 12 years. Some of the people that I met there, I had known from before, you know, from 20 years earlier or whatever it was.
Nicholas Christakis: I had real friends at Harvard, grown men, mostly men, some women who were my friends, who knew my character, who could vouch for me. The thing that happened in 2015 could never have happened at Harvard, because I would have had 100, at least 50 people that would have come out in public and said, what the hell is going on here? This guy is a good guy. You misunderstand. Et cetera. But when I was at Yale, I was a new person, which is also typical of these kinds of ostracism events. You know, where we have to cast out someone from our community in order to solidify our own community. My wife had to be cast out. That's what was going on then, right? She had to be demonized. They had to burn the witch at the stake. Which is the other thing that enraged me about that whole thing is they weren't just coming after me. They were coming after Erika. My testosterone was through the roof. I mean, no, I mean to self-regulate in that situation when they are, you know, they did things. The Yale students. This is not again, this is not widely known. It's not known at all, as far as I know. They photoshopped pictures of Erika on pornographic images, and they circulated, Yale students, and circulated them in the courtyard. Can you fucking believe that? I mean, just extraordinary. And I was in the courtyard one day.
Guest: Can you say what she did? I don't know if everyone knows.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, never mind. Never mind. She wrote an email. There was.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Actually actually, actually, you know, I was going to I didn't want to interrupt you, but I think it's good because you started off by by mentioning the fact that it's a part of, you know, your achievements. We don't know the extent to which people think of you in that context. Is there anybody in this room that does not know what we're talking about when we talk about the affair? Raise your hand if you don't know what we're talking about.
Nicholas Christakis: All right. Very briefly. Very, very, very, very briefly. Very, very briefly. Over the 5 or 10 years prior to 2015, there had been a growing sort of DI led movement with cautions about Halloween costumes. So in a way to signal a open commitment to minorities, progressively, there had been instead of actually doing the work of making people feel welcome, there was all this like symbolic, performative kind of stuff, one of which was annual notifications to students that they shouldn't wear offensive Halloween costumes, reminding Yale students not to wear black face or yellow face or red face or sombreros. There's a long list of stuff. And in fact, this had been happening all around the country. And there was there was, in fact, a New York Times article about it. Yet again, Halloween costume advice is coming out. And my wife had been teaching a class called The Concept of a Problem Child, about how kids have been problematized autistic kids and poor kids and pregnant kids and, you know, and she'd been teaching this wonderful class and and her students said, this is crazy. You know, it's infantilizing. We got this directive from a group of 13 or 14 Yale administrators that was sent to all of Yale students, warning them with a link to recommended and and non-recommended costumes, which if the costumes were so triggering, why were they sending photographs of Non-permissible costumes to all the students in the whole campus? And my wife, encouraged by her students who said this is crazy and encouraged by the broader conversation that was having in our country, misread.
Nicholas Christakis: We were new to the community. Misread. We misread what kind of community we were a part of. We thought we were a community where people understood our good intentions and where facts and reason were ascendant. And she wrote an email that went viral. Millions of people read it. If we had known it, we would have put a little link for a QR code or something on it, and it's now been archived. It's this these episodes have been described in something like 30 non-fiction books. And there are- there was just a session at Harvard where these events were seen as Sentinel events. Like what happened to us in 2015 is now, in retrospect, seen as a marker of a radical shift in attitudes in our society amongst college students. So my wife wrote, just fired off like an email saying, you know, many people have you know, I understand where this letter is coming from. It's motivated by good intentions. But we should ask, I believe, Erika said to our students at Yale, whether you students who are 20 year old to, you know, 18 to 22 year old students really want adults telling you what to wear. I mean, aren't you old enough to sort this out for yourselves and to self-regulate and to talk to each other? Like, how do I know if someone that had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest had their costume be like someone wearing a collar and holding a baby, and they painted the penis of the baby red, And this was their costume because they were protesting.
Nicholas Christakis: How can I then come and say, I'm offended by this costume and it should be prohibited. On what grounds? You don't know what I'm doing. Am I mocking religion? Am I making a political statement? You know, what is happening in that situation? Why can't we talk to each other, you're students, you're adults, you're Yale? Well, the shit hit the fan. And thousands of people signed letters denouncing my wife. They said that we should give advance warning before she came to the dining hall, because they didn't want to be in the same room with her. My Erika, I mean, they said this about Erika, which is insane if you knew Erika. Completely insane. I mean, this woman had done more good in the world than any of these little undergraduates, let alone all of the faculty that lined up, you know, with their own agendas. So, you know, I was having English professors lecturing me about structural racism, and I'm like, I worked on the South Side of Chicago for six years, taking care of minority patients who were dying in their own homes. What the hell are you telling me about redressing inequities? What have you done? You've written some essays using jargon.
Nicholas Christakis: You know? And you know, I've actually done shit. You know. I've done original research about, you know, how social factors affect health. I've cared for people. You know, I've worked in hospitals. I've saved people's lives. Have you saved anyone's life? You know, anyway, so they came for her, and it was a completely ridiculous situation. And then I there was a moment, like two weeks later where the students had assembled to protest us in the Silliman courtyard, and I had just finished an interview with a reporter, and Erika was away, I don't know where she was. And I was in this baronial Silliman master's house, and which is baronial and has like 16 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms. It's an extraordinary house, a beautiful library on the first floor. And the students were out in the courtyard, and I felt like Marie Antoinette, like, I'm in, you know, they're like, out there and I'm sitting in this baronial house and I have to decide what to do. I have to decide what to do. And I'm sitting there thinking, well, first of all, it felt unmanly or I don't know what unwomanly unmanly in the stereotypic sense, like un brave. Like it felt weak to sit there in the courtyard and not go talk to the students. Plus, it was is inconsistent with my principles, which is we talk about things and it felt disrespectful to the students who were protesting.
Nicholas Christakis: It turned out they were protesting me, but, you know, they were making a protest, which I should dignify and honor, I thought. So I stepped out of my house, which was so stupid, and I went into the courtyard. And then I was surrounded by 150 students for about 2.5 hours. And by sheer serendipity, I had done a series of speakers that year. I had tried to up the intellectual game at Silliman by having famous people come and speak in the Silliman Speaker series. And we had had at the beginning of the year, we had an African-American historian from MIT that came and wrote, came and spoke to the students. He wrote a book called Ebony and Ivy, talking about the history of racism in our elite institutions. So I had that guy. I had had a David Simon who wrote The Wires, a fantastic screenwriter, come and write, talk about screenwriting in Hollywood and a bunch of other people that I knew come and speak. And we had invited Greg Lukianoff, who is now the head of Fire, who at the time had had not yet written the coddling of oh, yeah, he had written The Coddling of the American Mind, the essay, not the book. Okay. And we had invited Greg to speak, and I'm out in the courtyard. And by sheer that day, actually, Greg had been invited, I think, by the Buckley program and we-
Nicholas Christakis: And I knew Greg because he had spoken at Harvard without incident, you know, four years earlier. And I had invited Greg to come speak and we- Greg was going to stay in the guest house at Silliman, and he arrived with his luggage and was walking through the courtyard, escorted by someone to get to his residence and stumbles on this scene where I'm surrounded by these people and takes out his camera and starts videotaping it, and he took four one minute clips. Meanwhile, there were about 20 cameras in that mob, and about an hour and a half of footage was released by multiple students, just to be clear. But Greg's clip went viral, and the students thought- they thought that somehow I had engineered this, that like I had contrived this or it was crazy, like paranoid thinking. It was total serendipity. I mean, Greg had been invited like six months earlier, and I could not organize the students in my to somehow acquire some kind of notoriety like, you know, it was crazy. And, so this video went viral and I just kept my cool in the courtyard. And then one of the students came up close to me and tried to threaten me. And I'm like thinking, okay, you know. Yeah. Shotokan is like, what? What?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: She almost hit you?
Nicholas Christakis: No, he. Well, that was another woman. There was a young man that came up to me and was nose to nose with me, and I was thinking about what to do. And one of my martial arts naive friends, these women I was speaking to afterwards, she goes like, well, you should have just sat down. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, that is a bad idea to sit down when you're surrounded by a lot of angry people. You don't want to be low to the ground because a kick to the head can kill you. Anyway. So, so so that's the viral. That's what happened. That was the episode. And my wife's email was eminently reasonable. And it became now has become a symbol of a certain certain shift in our society which we now look back on and can see. But at the time, it was really hard to cope with that. And we decided we were not going to resign in the middle of it, but over the course of the months afterwards, we decided that it would have taken too much of our lives to do a repair of the relationships with the students, especially since we had no support at all from the administration, like there was no truth and reconciliation. This was Yale's big mistake, and one of the things that led to another ten years of crap is we had no Truth and Reconciliation Commission, right? We had no honest accounting of what actually happened and where the limits were transgressed and where they were not, because there are rules on the books that were transgressed and nothing was done about them.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: For the record, we have a president in- Peter was president.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah, yeah. We have a president who's weak.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And has no spine.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes. I think-
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And couldn't stand up for any principle.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, I think that's correct.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I mean, we've seen it through the last ten years. Who came after Richard Levin, who did amazing things and revolutionized the city and the university. And it's a pattern that we've seen with President Salovey. And it's the reason we are where we are today, because.
Nicholas Christakis: I think we've moved laterally for ten years.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Absolutely. And he's gone sideways. The university has gone sideways, if not south. And if he would have had the the stamina and the respect and the dignity and the intelligence to stand up then at that seminal moment in Yale history, the worst moment of chutzpah, probably in higher education in America. I remember Toby coming home that night and saying the mere chutzpah. If that was my daughter, I. Why don't you just say it the way you said it then.
Toby Hecht: Drive her home and ground her for a year for talking like that
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Talk to a professor with that type of.
Toby Hecht: Instead, she got applauded. She got awarded.
Nicholas Christakis: She won the award. Well, a bunch of awards.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And so we have a president and therefore a culture top down here in the administration by the faculty to tolerate that type of chutzpah for a 19-20 year old girl to talk to a professor who's dedicated your life to saving people, you and your wife, to saving people's lives every single day of your life and educating people is the reason why higher education, frankly, is where it is today. Those are the moments when they could have stood up and I told it to Peter, and I sent him the article Toby in that magazine. That girl in Seattle had written the alum, and I finally got into it. I waited. I shouldn't have waited, maybe, but I waited, and then I sent it to him. Somebody who wrote, who exposed the whole real story there and back and forth. And it's like that today. It's the same thing with what happened on October 7th with the.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah. I.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Just, you know, just play it, play the politics and let it be. And when you see evil in front of you and not to call it out and make a statement about it, it's just it's terrible, terrible, terrible precedent.
Toby Hecht: It was very- I mean, just as a bystander, but someone who saw the video and was so upset for you and your wife and as a parent, to see the reaction to young people behaving this way and being applauded and being coddled, frankly. And I mean, you know, the, you know, the president who, you know, speaks all that emotional intelligence and he's just, you know, no application here, but not even just the rest of the faculty. Where is the faculty?
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Toby Hecht: And this is why we are where we are today in general. But to say that was a moment that was such a critical moment that I refer back to all the time, which is why I say you're a legend. And I would love to meet Erika one day, because it was such a shocking moment of betrayal in so many ways and a almost like a turnover of what it means to be doing what you and your wife.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes, we were trying to do that and, and but what's fascinating. Thank you for both of you for saying those things that you said. But if I can be dispassionate about it. What amazed me about those events. Let me talk about the Trent Colbert thing, and then I'll come back to our thing. Trent Colbert would have been such a such a soft pitch, so easy to defend him. He's half Native American.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Some people don't even know the Trent story either. So it's funny how fast time moves on this campus.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, for God's sakes. Trent Colbert was ...
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Does everybody know the trap house ?
Nicholas Christakis: He's a Yale law student. He's in the Federalist Society. And to be very clear, I'm a left of center politically. But I have friends all over the spectrum. I enjoy arguing with my conservative friends. I have libertarian friends. I have one libertarian friend in particular who drives me crazy, but I adore him. He's one of my three closest friends, and I, the man, is utterly brilliant, one of the smartest people I've ever met, and his views are just. But they give me pause. I'm like, God, Adam thinks this. I may be wrong, you know. Anyway.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Trent, Native American.
Nicholas Christakis: Native, half Native American guy from the reservation, I believe. Literally, like, but politically concerned. No, no. Not that. No. Okay. I thought he was okay.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: But definitely looks Native American. You see him-
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yes.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes. Trent definitely does.
Not to.
Speaker21: Yeah it's alright.
Waverly Wentworth: Not half.
Nicholas Christakis: I think he's half. I think he's.
Waverly Wentworth: No he's not. I mean I know him personally.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay.
Waverly Wentworth: His mother is Asian. His father is like half so.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh so he's a quarter then. Okay. All right.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay. So actually I have to say in my family, my wife's maiden name is Zuckerman. And in my family, my wife will often correct. I'll be telling a story and I'll be like, you know, in 1987, we did this. And she's like, no, actually, it was 1986, you know, and I call these annoying Zuckerman inaccuracies, you know, where they kind of interrupt and they correct. The thing that I say is not actually half. He's like a quarter. Okay. No, no. Hold on, I'm teasing you. Let me finish. Let me finish. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a little important that he's Native American. You know, he was part of the Native American group and whatever.
Waverly Wentworth: What was most important is that he was, like, visibly someone who wasn't white.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Not white. Exactly. Yeah.
Nicholas Christakis: I'll come back to the point in a moment. But anyway, and then I was telling this story to another close friend of mine, Dan Gilbert, about Asa's annoying Zuckerman inaccuracy. He goes, oh my God. In our household, we call these pointless spousal corrections (PSCs). Anyway, I'm teasing you. I'm taking a liberty. Please don't take it personally. Anyway, so Trent Colbert was some fraction Native American. Was a part of the Native American community here. Was in the Federalist Society. Wants to organize with his friends some kind of party. Sends out an invitation in which he uses some sort of childish expressions like, we're going to have some basic bitch like snacks, and we're going to get some fried chicken from a trap house. We're gonna have a trap house party, which apparently is a term of a slang word which originates from like a drug using cocaine house, but actually had entered our language and was more widely used. And you can look it up on whatever. And then the students, some minority students erupt and think that he's this awful racist person and that they were so threatened by this and so on. And you can correct me and get the facts, give the fact pattern better at the fact pattern better.
Nicholas Christakis: But the gist of it was he then gets called before some of the die bureaucrats at the law school, and they have a preformed apology note for him, a pre-written apology note, which they encourage him to sign because something might otherwise happen bad to his career. I mean, it was like straight out of, yeah, it was just extraordinary. And the fact pattern is extraordinary. And the reason I mentioned this particular fact pattern is because the dean of the law school, this was about the easiest case. It was like such a soft pitch, like you could have used the fact, this fact you didn't have, like some white guy with Nazi paraphernalia, right? You didn't have, like, a hard case of free expression to defend. This was like a pretty easy case that you could come to the defense of with an appealing defendant. You know that I think you could have won this case, but she didn't do that. And I think the same sort of situation. Please would you. You're wincing. Did I get could you do you want to add to the fact pattern? Are you sure?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Anybody who knows him knows he's the furthest thing from a racist. He's the furthest.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. So and if.
Nicholas Christakis: If you look at what happened with Jenny Martinez that when with the shoutdown of that conservative judge who I don't like. She handled- that law school Dean handled it much better. You know, her challenge. And I think, anyway, the reason I mention it is that I think we would have been easy to defend. You know, I think my wife's email was benign. I think it was well intentioned. It would have been easy to explain some misunderstandings. We were left of center politically. We weren't even. Not that it should have mattered, but we weren't. And we had previously been beloved of the students. You know, my wife had, you know, demand for her classes far exceeded supply. You know, there were hundreds of students. She was doubling and tripling her course offerings because so many students want to take it. She had the best ratings in Yale College as a teacher. Et cetera. Et cetera. We would have been easy to defend, but we were not defended because I think the community needed an ostracism. They needed someone to be cast out. And I would be damned if they were going to have my wife for that purpose, candidly. So anyway, that's that whole episode, but that's enough on that unless you have burning details. And then we could go back to science or biography. Yeah.
Guest: Oh if it's on this.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, yeah. That's fine. No. Yeah a couple more. Yeah. Go on.
Speaker1: I mean, I was a freshman on campus when this happened.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, is that right?
Yeah. And then I come back for my PhD now. So my sort of institutional memory of Yale, it begins with those that come before and it happens. And when I was here, of course, there were, you know, there were three totemic linguistic transformations that happened from 2015 on, which is, of course, master became head.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Calhoun became Hopper and freshman became first year.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
And these three battles, which were battles, I think, before. I somehow got wound up with, with your incident in some ways. And it became this I mean, I remember the march of Resistance. It was just an incredible- the amount of, the furious behavior everywhere was was a sight to behold. At the time, though, I mean, students still were interestingly provocative I found for the next several years afterwards. There were still loads of students who found it ridiculous and would write such things in the paper, and there would be those sorts of. So I just wonder, coming back, what I've noticed in a major way. And this is what I want to hear your perspective on, especially knowing that you've just helped to found the Faculty at Yale Initiative, that sort of thing. But it seems that students are much more fearful. That seems to be the biggest change. And I wonder how much you think it relates to these events that go back. And it's very seem very quiet.
Nicholas Christakis: It's yeah, it's very hard for me because I've devoted my life to teaching young people. I love kids these days. I love kids these days. And I don't want to be the last person that says, oh, kids these days are really bad, you know, or whatever. I mean, you know, there's jokes. You know, Socrates writes about kids these days, don't respect their elders. I mean, this has been an interesting psychology about this. My friend Dan Gilbert published a study of why everyone thinks kids these days are so bad. And yet there's no evidence that morality is declining. Just every generation thinks that kids these days are so bad. So I refuse to think ill of kids these days. I just don't want to. And yet. And yet kids these days, you know, it's it's unbelievable. Like, I see it in my classroom. They're afraid to speak. They're afraid to speak. I remember when I was at Yale, we would argue with our roommates. We would go to the dining hall. We would have political arguments with people. And for fun, we would argue about stuff. They don't do that anymore. They just don't. It's very weird to me. So I don't know what to make of that. I see it in my classroom. I have to really work hard to encourage my students to talk. And I talk to my other- my colleagues who are experienced master teachers, many of them. And they describe the same thing. They describe extraordinary efforts they have to make to extract from the students and to train them. One of the tricks my wife used to use, which I use, you guys might want to use a great trick.
Nicholas Christakis: So someone says something that you know is like forbidden, let's say in the classroom. Instead of making giving kids a dichotomous choice, do you agree or disagree? Say, well, who agrees? You know, 80% with what Suzy just said. Nobody raises. Who agrees 50% with Suzy, one person. Who agrees 20% with, four people. Who agrees 10%? You know, maybe she's a little bit right, Suzy, you know, and and so when you give people that gradation, then it allows them to have a bit of a conversation. You know, when you say, well, what is it about the 10% that you agree with Suzy and what do you disagree with? And you can then cultivate. But the amount of work that's required with this crop of kids these days is just incredible. And I see it in my public health class, you know, where there are a lot of fraught topics, you know, to what extent, for example, do doctors act with racial animus? The racist animus is it and there's mixed evidence. There's much evidence that doctors act in a racist fashion when they're assigning, for example, expensive treatments. And there's much evidence against it. And it's hard to know actually what the truth is. Both are believable, as far as I'm concerned, to believe that there's this vast racist conspiracy amongst some of the most beneficent people in our society who are setting out to care for people is pretty hard. On the other hand, there's a lot of evidence that, you know, so it's difficult. So I show the kids all the evidence. I'm saying, you know, I don't know what to think about this. And so on, you know. Yeah.
Ben Harland: Just one more question about this. I was wondering if you're familiar with the theory of Nassim Taleb's theory. It's called intolerant minority. By no means he means racial minority. He just means that there's an ideological minority in certain institutions that can basically capture.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah. His famous example of the kosher lemonade. Right.
Ben Harland: Well, the London example, I think has been that can.
Guest: Capture what that.
Ben Harland: Can just capture the institution well against.
Nicholas Christakis: I don't know, the London example, the example.
Ben Harland: He talks about, he talks about halal food in London. Yeah.
Nicholas Christakis: And it goes like now you have this like you have this kosher label on products which aren't even remotely non-kosher, you know. And yeah, like gluten free. Exactly.
Ben Harland: And I was wondering if you sense that maybe that's what's going on at a Harvard or Yale, because I was an undergrad at Harvard and my experience was-.
Nicholas Christakis: Which college. Which house were you in?
Ben Harland: Dunster. Dunster. And my experience was that these people who are extremely vocal in their beliefs are really a minority of students, yet they have an outsized influence.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I think. I'm sorry, I don't want to I think the word we're talking about is the hijacking. It's literally a hijacking.
Nicholas Christakis: But yeah. No, I was just going to say, I think here I encourage people to be braver, you know, to speak up, even if you're not, even if the people opposed to this minority are not the majority, there are still a goodly minority. You know, 40% of people probably don't hold these views, at least. So how much bravery is required? And I think part of the reason is they have an auto de fe, right. They burn someone at the stake to get everyone else in line. Just like the just like the Chinese Communist Party in the Cultural Revolution. Right. Or like, like Sun Tzu writes, you know, when he when he gets the the princess harem in order by executing the first one. You know, I think it's extremely effective. People look at what happens to, let's say, people who are who are denounced in this fashion and they're like, I don't want that. And so it just encourages silence. Incidentally, it's also why they tend to police people that are on the boundary or within the community. Right? You know, like if they had gone after like some far right conservative like, these people are nuts, I don't care, there's nothing to be done. That's not who you're policing. You're policing the people like at the boundary. So, so anyway, I think these behaviors are widely described. You know, I found during that year I reread a bunch of things. The first thing I reread was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, which I read every ten years. I read two books- I read three books every ten years. I read the Iliad. Who is the hero in the Iliad? Who knows? Who's the hero in the Iliad?
Guest: The rage.
Nicholas Christakis: Who thinks it's Achilles?
Guest: It's Cassandra.
Nicholas Christakis: No, it's not Cassandra. Who thinks Achilles is the hero? No, no, no, no, it's Hector, the Trojan prince. It's Hector who's the hero of Achilles. Not the Greek, the Trojan who valiantly struggles to save his city, you know, with a ne'er do well sibling who kidnapped this Greek princess and brought her back and brought ruin, with an elderly father, with his sister Cassandra, who told the truth, but nobody believed, with the Greeks at bay, you know, trying to break down his walls, fighting and fighting and fighting, knowing that he's doomed, right? That his beloved wife Andromache would be put to death and taken as a slave. That Astyanax, his son, would be thrown from the ramparts. Hector is the real hero. So I reread the Iliad. I reread The Last Days of Socrates, which is unbelievable, and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. So I reread it that year and it's just extraordinary if you haven't read it. I mean, it's just you should all read it. It's unbelievable how he could- the realizations he came to in the concentration camp after his wife, either his wife was pregnant or had just delivered a baby, his first wife, they were put to death. And then he survives in this extraordinary way and returns to Austria, to Vienna and forgives the people that had not helped him or denounced him. Unbelievable. Actually, the volume I have of Man's Search for Meaning has he wrote like these- after the. Within ten days of the release from the concentration camp, he wrote this book. It's about 50 or 60 pages. The volume I have has his correspondence. Afterwards, when he sets up this Logotherapy Institute in Vienna, with Viennese and is just as incredible. So I reread those things and I reread the backI. You know, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, well, a bunch of teenage girls like, rip him to rip someone to shreds in a you.
Guest: Know.
Nicholas Christakis: What?
Guest: His mother too.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Guest: And she turns his head.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes, yes. That's right.
Guest: Yes.
Eli Tadmor: Every wonderful head of a lion. And then dad is like, are you?
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Eli Tadmor: I have some bad news.
Nicholas Christakis: Bad news is your son. That's right. The bad guy. And then last I reread Nelson Mandela's autobiography.
Guest: Long Walk to Freedom.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes. And? And I'm thinking my problems are fucking trivial. I mean, you know, they are really trivial by comparison to Viktor Frankl and Nelson Mandela and and Socrates and, you know, and it was really helpful. Right. I mean, it was hugely helpful. And there's a lot of wisdom in these things, because my point I'm making here is with the allusions to the Chinese Communist Party, is that there's nothing new under the sun. All of the things we are seeing, all of the crazy ideological ideological commitments, the mob mentality, the fear, the inability to stand. Like there was a conservative writer in England who wrote a nice essay. I don't particularly agree with this guy, and I'm blanking on his name. I don't know, it was Murray. Murray is pretty smart. I can't remember who it was. He wrote an article about like about ostracism. You go like, okay, look, he says, you don't have to be very brave. You don't have to oppose all this stuff, but at least defend your friends. You know, he basically says, you know, like, if at least the people who are friends of the people who are being victims of this type of behavior spoke up that you could do that. You know, you can at least do that, talking about how we started today. So, anyway, so there's nothing new under the sun. All of these phenomena are old, ancient phenomena that have been studied scientifically, have been studied philosophically, have been studied religiously. I didn't read the Book of Job again, actually. That would have been a bit much.
Guest: In the original.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, exactly. But anyway. So I don't know. So I don't know how I got on to Victor Frankl, but yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Pass the mic down.
Guest: Can we ask about, like, love and friendship?
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Guest: Okay, cool. So two quick ones. The first distinguish between mostly just elaborate on like what love at first sight actually means from a scientific standpoint. And you know, if that's real and if so, like what does it mean for that to be real? And how is that different from like liking someone at first sight and then related to that for hypothetical but like, not at all reasons. So like how often does love at first sight, like, turn into a relationship? Do you know that statistic?
Nicholas Christakis: Well, if it's mutual, it's a lot. I'm talking about love at first sight that's reciprocated. Not the kind of infatuation you and I may have had in high school where we.
Yeah..
Nicholas Christakis: High school and college or medical school where- I was in love with this woman and she had no idea who the hell I was. Yeah. That was not an uncommon experience. I have a kind of a romantic. I'm actually a hopeless romantic. Honestly, completely, pathetically hopeless romantic.
Guest: You're married?
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, now I am. Yes. No. Since then.
Guest: See I'm not. See, my generation is not getting married.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes, I know that. And also not having sex, which is fascinating to me. It's just incredible to me. Yeah, well, some people think it's porn. Yeah, it's a bunch of things. It's a failure to assume adult roles. You guys are also not getting your driver's licenses. You're not, you know, you're not getting married. You're not having sex. You're delaying entry into the job market. I mean, not you personally, but there's, like, a lot of indicators.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I actually, I actually think it's the not getting married, Toby may have a better insight to this, is I think a lot of it is also the inhibition. Because our communication is so false today and we're not being honest.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We were guarded. Much more guarded. And so we're not letting our guard down. We're not being vulnerable. You're not being our relationships.
Nicholas Christakis: Are thinner.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Are thinner.
Nicholas Christakis: Kids these days.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Less authentic, and therefore everybody's on guard. And so how could you possibly be intimate?
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: From, you know, with frankly, at the outset of stranger. But how could you get intimate if you can't even communicate?
Nicholas Christakis: Yes, I agree with that.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Honestly. You know, you can't even make a joke anymore.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You can't just. You can't kibbitz anymore. Yeah, yeah, you can't flirt. I mean.
Nicholas Christakis: Flirting is very dangerous. I told my sons when they went to college, I said, are you going to date men and women at other universities?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yes.
Nicholas Christakis: Not at your own, yes.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And so it's terrible. I mean, so people today and I see it in the interaction, you know, you really need to almost break the ice to just let us, like, be people and joke and be honest and, you know, insult each other and get back and.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And it is a reflection of that deeper cultural destruction, essentially, where this lie, the pervasive lies, have become- have basically hijacked society. And so there's so much distancing and it's subconscious and it's reflecting. It's not the cause. It's the symptom. It's the fact, of course, people aren't getting married and having sex because people aren't even interacting with other people the way normal human beings should be interacting and building real relationships, because everybody's worried about what the you know, what the board is going to say, what the leadership is going to say, what the rules are. You know.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, I'm with you.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The rules are so.
Nicholas Christakis: It depends on reciprocated. Reciprocate has a high predicted probability of of successful relationship. Right. You fall in love, she falls in love with you or he you know, it's like a mutual. It's kismet. You get it, you're off to the races. If it's unilateral, then it's, you know, not very successful.
Guest: Like what percentage are not not successful?
Nicholas Christakis: I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer. You would know. If you were in love with someone, if you fell in love with them, at love at first sight and they- I mean, I don't know, you may have never had the experience where you're sitting in a train and you strike up a conversation and you just find yourself falling in love. Oh, I made a note to mention this. One of the things that's very interesting about both friendship and affection and sexual or romantic attraction is obviously there's a difference between lust and love. Big difference, is these sort of liminal states or these transitory states that, where our inhibitions are reduced. So, for example, you probably all had this experience of going away. When you first arrived at Yale in freshman year, remember the first three weeks and the Iron Curtain typically comes down at the third week. Everyone's very friendly. You sit down with strangers, you strike up a conversation. Right? And it's not weird. Oh. What's your name? Oh, hi. Where are you from? Tell me more about that. You just immediately are talking. You get close to them. The whole nine yards. And then after three weeks, then you have your friends and that's it and you don't interact. And then it's weird if someone is like this friendly with you, you're like, who is this creep that is acting a behavior that a few minutes ago. Same with cruises. When people go on cruises, they're like, oh, we love each other. We're going to get back together when the cruise is over. And of course, they never do. You never go to the the city or wherever or in Canterbury Tale, you know, Canterbury Tales when they're going on a pilgrimage, right? They all become very friendly, you know, ... ... ... and bothered every vein in Swiss liqueur.
Nicholas Christakis: Et cetera. Et cetera. I could do the whole 18 lines, but anyway, the ... that's when people want to go on pilgrimages. All of these are structural moments when the guard is down and people can form these things. And this is why this plus engaging in physical activity. So physical activity releases a lot of hormones that your potential partner confuses with you. So if you go running with someone, they have these endorphin rush. And actually it's from the running, but they think, oh, you're great. And so and you can also do this with fear. There's a very famous experiment that was done where this guy asks women - it was a heterosexual situation - a guy asked women out on dates, and he asked the women out, random women, strangers to him. Literally. Hi. How are you? My name is Bob. Would you like to see me tonight for dinner? And he asked them at the base of a bridge and at the peak of the bridge, like on the top. And then when the number of women who said yes to his proposal for a date at the peak of the bridge was like five times higher, because they're a little anxious when you get to the top of the bridge and you confuse that heightened arousal, which is just fear. You think, oh, this is an interesting person.
Guest: Going on a run like works.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, running is really good. So any athletic activity or any kind of sporty activity or activity in nature, these are very effective.
Guest: So running in nature.
Nicholas Christakis: Is even better.
Guest: Yes that's right. Okay. That's very nice. Yeah. Right there. Yeah. The next one. Do you want to go run up a mountain with me in the woods and I'll.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Pass the mic around.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, but hold on, let me just finish. So to answer your question so the bilateral is important so unilateral, it doesn't count. And then, you asked me about, and in love at first sight is, I think, objectively different. Oh. And it has not to my knowledge, nobody has ever been able to to contrive circumstances where they could collect a large enough sample of love at first sight and non love at first sight to compare the physiology of it. So we just know people's descriptions, like how people feel and what they describe. We have a very big literature on this, not just like the poets writing, but we have like testimony from people saying what they felt like. And I discussed this in blueprint. I have a whole- I have two chapters on love and like at first sight, of course, is a much more common experience and has a completely different basis. I didn't get into this earlier. Like why it's to our advantage to have friends. And there's a very famous article by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides called the The Bankers Paradox, which is there's this very funny observation that bankers don't want to lend you money when you need it. Bankers only want to lend you money when you don't need it. Well, how the hell are they bankers, then? Like, how does that work exactly?
Nicholas Christakis: So someone who really desperately needs money is not a good security risk. You don't want to lend them money. Instead, I'm going to offer money to people who don't need it. And that's who I should give it to. So what they argue is that friendship. So that our ancestral environment was full of dangerous situations in which another person, through the application of something that was low risk to them, could be a huge payoff to us. And the example that they use is you're drowning in a river, and they can just lower the branch, person on the shore, can lower the branch and help you out of the river and save your life, which is something a friend of yours would do in a moment, and it would be very fitness enhancing to you. So the argument is that our ancestral environment was full of these situations in which we faced grave peril, but which a little effort by somebody who cared about us, who we could maybe eventually reciprocate that in an asymmetric way. So the thing you have to understand about your friendship is if I come to you and I say, you know, give me, do me this favor, and tomorrow I'll do you this other favor.
Nicholas Christakis: Is that how friends speak to each other?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: No.
Nicholas Christakis: No, not at all. That's the tit for tat. Yeah, that's a transaction. That's a market economy. That's the opposite of friendship. What a friend does is say, I could use a favor and you're like, sure, right. And it's unstated. You might or might not like in The Godfather. The day may come or it may not come when I will ask you, you know, so a favor. And that's what friends do to each other. And it's disjunct in time and it's disjunct in nature. You might lend your friend an apartment while you're away, and they might later on, you know, introduce you to a girlfriend or something, you know? In other words, they're not commensurate. The goods you exchange with your friends are completely not- it's not a transaction. And yes, it's asymmetric in time and nature. And so the argument that a Tooby and Cosmides make is that and this is discussed in Blueprint, is that the evolution of friendship has to do with the provision of these types of goods, that if an institution could have evolved, that would allow us as a species to to have these advantages, we would do it. And so that's their argument. And there's evidence for that argument. And I review it in the book. Yeah.
My Life Q&A
-
Eli Tadmor: Hi. I wanted to ask two questions. One, are you familiar with W.H. Auden's poem archaeology?
Nicholas Christakis: No, I don't know if I know that poem, but I know his Stop All the Clocks, of course.
Eli Tadmor: Oh, no. Yeah, that is very different. I have a lot of gripe with- never mind. So the poem, it was the last in every edition of Auden that I've seen. It's the last poem and it ends when I get to. No it ends with the line. So he talks about history and he says, oh. Archaeologists don't really know. And he says that history is basically a lie being made essentially by the criminal in us goodless is timeless. So the.
Nicholas Christakis: History is a lie being made by the criminal?
Eli Tadmor: No, no, no. So history like the history books, all everything the history books say is a lie because history is made by the criminal in us. Goodness is timeless. So the idea of the poem is that what we have left from history, all the history books especially, you know, he was in the 50s before Microhistory is much. All the events, these are one side of humanity and everything in the background. Everything that makes possible is the goodness that is timeless. And you never hear about. And it's actually a nice poem. He also has the great line. The poets have learned us their myths, but just how did they take them? That's a stumper.
Nicholas Christakis: The poets have learned us.
Eli Tadmor: Their myths.
Nicholas Christakis: Their myths.
Eli Tadmor: But how exactly did they take them? That's a stumper. So he said, we don't really know. So it's just a really nice poem. Also a nice usage of the to learn is in to teach, which is very old.
Nicholas Christakis: My next book is going to be on social meaning. I'm working on this book right now. It's going to take a few years, but I'm going to go and reread these things.
Eli Tadmor: No, I will, I can send Shmully the stuff. I can send it to you. The other question that I actually it's more of a wonder. The text that I'm working on, my PhD is called the- I call it the epic. It has like ten different names in the literature.
Nicholas Christakis: You're not the Assyriologist?
Eli Tadmor: I am.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, you're the Assyriologist.
Eli Tadmor: I am. Yeah.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, great. Yes.
Eli Tadmor: Yeah. I hope it's great. I'm looking for a job right now, but. So. So.
Nicholas Christakis: I'll tell you a funny story about the Oriental Institute of Chicago.
Eli Tadmor: Oh, oh now, speaking of this, now, it is not no longer the Oriental Institute. It is the Institute for the study of the Ancient World, comma. Of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of West Asia and North Africa. Isaac.
Nicholas Christakis: They no longer called the Oriental.
Eli Tadmor: Not at all, because since 2 years ago. Two years ago.
Nicholas Christakis: Two years ago.
Eli Tadmor: Yeah. Yeah.
Nicholas Christakis: So up until two years ago.
Eli Tadmor: Yeah.
Nicholas Christakis: I had not been notified.
Eli Tadmor: No no no. They it's now ISAAC. But that's a different thing.
Nicholas Christakis: Can I tell you my story very quickly?
Eli Tadmor: Yes. Of course.
Nicholas Christakis: So when I was at the University of Chicago, which I loved, my neighbor was Peter Dorman, a very famous Egyptologist who then went on to be the president of the American University in Beirut before Khoury, the current president, the American University of Beirut. And Peter Dorman was at a very famous party. This was this would have been in 1996 or 97. The Egyptology department had assembled at the house of someone at the University of on the campus in Hyde Park. And there were these buildings that were three flats. There was one apartment per floor. And out back there were these wooden decks that were stacked, one on top of the other, and all of these raucous Egyptologists had gone out onto this wooden deck on the second, or I think, the third floor in this particular case. And we're all hanging out there drinking and doing whatever Egyptologists do.
Eli Tadmor: They actually get- they get stuff. Surprisingly, they know how to live, unlike Assyriologists.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay, so the Egyptologist know how to live and there were so many of them out there on the deck that the structurally unstable deck collapsed.
Eli Tadmor: Oh, no.
Nicholas Christakis: And like the entire Egyptology department of the University of Chicago-.
Eli Tadmor: Died.
Nicholas Christakis: Fell three stories and was injured. And apparently, the entire world of Egyptologists was ecstatic.
Eli Tadmor: Yes. Of course.
Nicholas Christakis: Tenured jobs had just opened up, you know, like, oh, there's a you know, because there's one Egyptology job per year in the whole world. And now all of a sudden they were like, oh, no. Yeah. I hope none of them died. As it turned out, they were all alive.
Eli Tadmor: I think there's a there's a very-.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You may want to pray for a storm.
Eli Tadmor: No, I think there's a novel to be written, it won't sell well, about someone who goes around murdered tenured professors to get their jobs, like a contractor or someone grad students. And exactly in my stage call, can you please murder?
Nicholas Christakis: I have a small corner of a tablet. I don't know where I acquired a clay tablet written in cuneiform.
Eli Tadmor: Which one? Do you have a photo? Have you had it identified?
Nicholas Christakis: I can send you a photo. I have it, and I took it to a professor of, I think your field at the formerly known Oriental Institute, ISAAC, to translate for me.
Eli Tadmor: Which one? Do you remember which professor?
Nicholas Christakis: It was very old guy when I was a young man, so I was.
Eli Tadmor: Oh, that does not narrow it down.
Nicholas Christakis: I know. Exactly. Anyway, he translated it for me, and he could read it, which I thought was just like magic. By the way, this is one of the things people misunderstand me a lot. Of course, I'm very devoted to the sciences, but I am such a fierce defender of the humanities and people don't get this about me because what is the mission of the university? It's the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge. And where in our society do we preserve Assyriology? In these institutions. This is the money is to be devoted. The money is to be devoted to the preservation of these ancient languages, among other things. That is our purpose. Right. And so I think if my world, we would have many more people doing what you're doing.
Eli Tadmor: But then more people would compete with me for the job.
Nicholas Christakis: Maybe they would. I don't know how it would play out the equilibrium, but do we have we don't have enough people doing that. And one of my one of my colleagues here is Howard Bloch. I don't know if you guys know him. He's a medieval French. You know, he can read. He's extraordinary. One of the most erudite people I've ever met. And actually the most erudite person I've ever met is Tony Kronman, by far. And but Howard is up there and, you know, we would have more people like that as far as I'm concerned.
Eli Tadmor: Thank you. That's the nicest thing I've heard someone say about Assyriology in a while, so thank you. No, no. One second. That's my question though. Okay. Sorry. So very, very quickly. Never mind that. Later. I'll talk to you later.
Nicholas Christakis: No, no, no. What's your question?
Eli Tadmor: No, I'm just saying. The text I'm studying is called the era epic. I think you might be interested in it because it has a scene where Era who's the god of death, destruction and hatred, who's also a complete narcissist goes into Babylon. And then he makes he becomes a demigod. He changes into a man and becomes a demigod. And then everyone he makes, then he assembles a mob, and then he makes the mob kind of go on a revolution against the king, basically. And then he goes to the king and makes him go and kill all the rebels. And the nice thing about it is that Era makes other people behave as he behaves. So he's full of hate and he's completely self destructive and not self destructive. He can't be destroyed, but he makes people filled with self destructive hatred because he does it to manipulate them into their own destruction and to destroy the things that they hold most dear to themselves.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay, so two things this text was reduced to writing when? 5000 years ago.
Guest: Oh, no no, not that much. Probably about 1000 BC, though it's hard to tell.
Nicholas Christakis: So 3000 years ago is reduced. And how old is it before then? What is it?
Guest: We don't know. So the earliest attested copies are about the seventh, eighth or seventh century BC. I have a chapter in my dissertation about.
Guest: On the rocks.
Nicholas Christakis: I mean.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Talk about instant likes, baby.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: There it is.
Eli Tadmor: Yeah, I have a chapter on my dissertation about.
Nicholas Christakis: Would you please send this to me? Because in my book on meaning, I'm looking for these ancient stories.
Guest: I have, I have actually have a new translation of it just running.
Nicholas Christakis: Please send it to me.
Guest: Okay, I will.
Nicholas Christakis: It'll make me seem more erudite when I. When I of course I will in my book.
Guest: Yes. Thank you. Yes.
Nick Maurer: So this is this is a small question back to 2015, but I promise it contains the most natural dovetail to whatever you want to talk about.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay. People are curious. And now you're giving me whiskey so you can have anything. You can have anything you want.
Nick Maurer: So when I think about other academics who got caught up in campus controversy, right, particularly like culture war-esque controversies, they all universally like, left academia and sort of leaned more into culture war stuff, you know? Jordan Peterson now works for the Daily Wire. Right. You did not. You were a notable exception to that trend. So there must be something about the university that you found valuable for some reason. So I guess that's my question. Why did you decide to stay?
Nicholas Christakis: And I hear I rely on Nietzsche. When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. So I think a lot of these people have lost their way. You know, they. And the way I think about it is that, like, I was once mugged when I was a teenager, and so I was a victim of this crime. And why would I let this criminal define who I am, right? Why would I, for the rest of my life, see myself as a victim? Or why would I let this chance event? Like, I'm not going to be defined by what a bunch of young Yale students did on a particular day. It's not their business to define me. I'm different than that. I have my own destiny in life. I have my own path in life. I happened to stumble into this mess. But that's not who I am, and I don't need to adopt this. Now, I could choose to if I wanted. That's people are free to do what they want. But that's my whole point. In fact, one of the reasons and I am happy to talk to you guys about this, but, you know, it's like I rarely indulge this because, you know, I didn't choose this.
Nicholas Christakis: These people acted in this insane way. I did my best, and I it's not me. You know, I have other things I want to do in my life. And a lot of these people have become the way you describe, because I think they haven't been able to resolve it. You know, it's just it's such an awful experience. I can't even- I haven't even told you guys so many things that were so awful about that period in our lives. They're angry, understandably angry at the people who did this to them. And they want revenge. Right. But Mandela said, you know, seeking revenge is like drinking a poison and hoping it kills your enemies. Yeah. I mean, this is not a wise way to be, in my view. So I affirmatively I've thought about this. I'm aware of what you said. I refuse to be defined by these crazy people, and I have no desire to become my worst self or worse, to become like them, you know? So, anyway, so that's so that's why.
Nick Maurer: Yeah. So I guess there are other things you could do besides stay at Yale. So is there anything about, like, the university being that Yale?
Nicholas Christakis: Hold on. Let me say something about that. Yeah. You must. You may not know much about academia, but what do you think it would take for another university to hire me? Not now, ten years later, but in 2016. Do you think any university in 2014? I could have gone to any university in this world. In 2016, where are my choices?
Guest: Trump University. He's got the mic.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Whose got the mic. Speak with the mic in your hand.
Gabriel Diamond: So you call yourself an optimist, but are you optimistic about the future of Yale and higher education more broadly? And one of the I guess an aspect of this question is, are you optimistic about the presidential search process and having someone new besides Salovey?
Nicholas Christakis: I think the pendulum will swing. I'm not that optimistic about Yale honestly. I think MIT and Stanford are going to take us to lunch in the next generation. I think they are training. You know, what people don't seem to understand is that the wealth is going to be created no longer by patrician bankers from New York that come to Yale and study English and return to their parents investment bank and then give money. The wealth is going to be created by techies, and they're going to give the billions that will then support the assyriologists. You should want more computer scientists trained at your university, because those are the ones that are going to endow. They're going to create the wealth.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Do you think the techies are going to care about this reality?
Nicholas Christakis: They may not, but then they will free up resources. Some will, but they may also free up the resources to support these universities. So I think that, I think that.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yale students.
Nicholas Christakis: I think Yale is going to continue to fall in the rankings, unfortunately, unless it's extremely capably led suddenly because we still are the second richest university in the world. We have tremendous wealth. We could do anything we wanted if we allocated the resources correctly. So we have a lot of- we have a great brand still. We have a lot of human capital talent. But I think the rise of MIT and Stanford is going to give everyone a run for their money, all the historical elite universities. I think Harvard will be okay.
Guest: What about Berkeley?
Nicholas Christakis: I think Berkeley is going to be screwed by the state schools. I think the private schools for the next 15 years, I think the private schools are going to be much safer bets. So I think in general, this sort of this cultural moment, we're in with some of the threats to academic freedom, some of the threats to free expression on campus, some of the things we're talking about, I think we're not yet we may be past peak, maybe there's some debate, but we're not yet on the other side of it. So I think we have another half generation of it, maybe ten more years of it, but it will turn. It will eventually stop, the pendulum will swing and we'll get a new equilibrium, a new stability. Where are the university rankings are at that time, I don't know. What happens to Yale, I also don't know. It depends on who they appoint. It depends on the will of the board and the sagacity of the board. I don't know what's going to happen at Yale, but, you know, I'm 61 and I'm going to run my lab for the next ten years or 12 years, and then I will, you know, retire to write books or something. More books than I write now.
Gabriel Diamond: Would you would you send your kids here now?
Nicholas Christakis: Well, I did send my kids here.
Guest: Would you.
Nicholas Christakis: Let me put it this way? I think if you're the kind of student who takes charge of their own education, and you have maturity and insight and some strength of character, I think you can learn anything you want at Yale. Yeah, I think I love the fact I love our elite universities. I think they're a hallmark of our our civilization. They reflect our wealth. They reflect our values. They are drivers of our security and our health and our well-being and our innovation. They are deeply important institutions in our society, in my view, and that's why I get so angry when they're mismanaged and they're handled poorly. I think people are are abandoning their posts honestly, and not just the administration, but many faculty. I think many faculty don't see academia as a calling. They see it as a sinecure. You know, I'll just get a wage and and do some BS and stuff. They don't really take it seriously. And so, you know, I think- I don't know what's going to happen to Yale. I don't know who the next president will be. I suspect it's going to be someone internal, because I think it'll be very difficult for them to appoint an external person that will arrive here in two months to take over July 1st. So what?
Guest: Odds on Holloway getting it from Rutgers?
Nicholas Christakis: I don't think Jonathan will be selected. He might be. I don't think Jonathan will be selected.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: It's going to be a Black or a woman.
Nicholas Christakis: I think it's been scrambled by the Claudine gay fiasco. I think that axis.
Guest: That was awesome.
Nicholas Christakis: So I think that'll be scrambled, so I don't know. I've heard some information which I'm on camera, so I'm not going to talk about. No no no no no no no no no. I'm not going to talk about it anyway.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Heather Gerken the word is out.
Nicholas Christakis: No no no. I'm not going to talk about it anyway. It's just it's, you know, but I will say that I suspect, given the fact pattern that I'm aware of, that it's likely to be an internal candidate just because that person can assume. And then you can work down the roster of who are the logical internal candidates. But it could be someone, it could be a wild card. It could be someone, as you suggested, like like Betsy Bradley, who was at Yale and could easily come back. But think about what it would be for that person to abandon their current institution with no warning.
Guest: I just wondered if they were fast tracking him in advance through promotions.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, but if they were doing that, why hasn't he been appointed already?
Guest: Because Peter Salovey was still finishing his term.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh I see. No, there's not that kind of planning that's going on.
Guest: I don't know how far.
Nicholas Christakis: No no no no there's not. I don't know. I don't know. No I don't. Anyway, that particular man has a lot of baggage at Rutgers, so I don't know what'll happen.
Where's the mic?
Nicholas Christakis: He was not. He was an invidious force in 2015. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest: Against the human nature.
Nicholas Christakis: He was an invidious force in multiple regards.
Guest: Yeah.
Victor Agbafe: Thank you so much for coming, Dr Christakis. I have two questions
Nicholas Christakis: Call me Nicholas, please.
For context, for the first one, I was at Harvard from 2015 to 2019. So that fiasco.
Nicholas Christakis: Which college were you at?
I was in Dunster.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay. Also in Dunster.
Speaker21: Yeah.
Victor Agbafe: Great house.
Nicholas Christakis: Who was the master when you were there?
Victor Agbafe: The- Roger Porter my-
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, I know the Porter's.
First year.
Victor Agbafe: And then- oh, I forget it was a philosopher my last two years there. I forget the couple.
Speaker21: Wasn't that a questionable company? Yeah. Um.
Victor Agbafe: But, I went to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education conference 2017-2018. Talked to Greg Lukianoff a few times and something that he said that struck me, he said on the issue of like, free speech, free expression, in the past, it was almost like a tool that you could say the oppressed, the minorities kind of used to be able to express their ideas. Right. Especially-.
Nicholas Christakis: Because the majority doesn't need protection of free expression. They have the ballot and the gun. Right. So this is Martin Luther King's famous argument, and he's correct that these are protection of minority rights. This is why we protect them, in fact.
Victor Agbafe: Right. But.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Victor Agbafe: Around this era though, he said. Right. Like 2010s, there was like a shift, feeling that almost like free speech was used as, like a tool against, like those with less power.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Victor Agbafe: I guess.
Nicholas Christakis: The people began to make that argument. I don't believe it's true, that argument, but people certainly began to make that argument.
Victor Agbafe: Well, I guess why do you think that argument is made? And how how do you think- how do you foresee, based off of your research and understanding that our understanding of that is going to shift potentially.
Nicholas Christakis: So I don't research these topics, and I'm often asked to make give remarks on, you know, kids these days and campus issues. And I say no to all of those requests. I'm happy to come and talk about science and- in a salon environment like this, I'm happy to talk to you guys. So I don't actually research these matters. And I'm not John Hiatt, who's brilliant, and I really like John. He's an interesting man, actually. The, so I don't have any scientific expertise on these matters. I think that, however, just anecdotally or empirically, I think actually the people who, paradoxically, the people who are saying that free expression is a weapon of the powerful actually are the powerful ones themselves, certainly on our campuses. And I think this inversion is very self-serving. You know, like I said, I don't think the majority doesn't need protection of its speech rights. If you have a popular view, you can express it. It's the minority with the unpopular view, which is what it means to have an unpopular view. It means it's uncommon. Popular means free, you know, you're the one that needs protection. And so- and MLK was magnificent on this. I mean, he was just extraordinary. And by the way, I didn't say this earlier, but there is a- I don't want to overdo it because some people have misread my book Blueprint. I don't think that Blueprint does not provide, nor does it intend to provide some kind of a prescription for political order.
Nicholas Christakis: I'm not suggesting that I know, or the research that I do or have discussed in that book is a guide for how we should organize a good society. But what I do say, and I do believe, is that any political arrangement that seeks to arrest these innate human tendencies is doomed to failure. So, for example, if you think about the Stasi, the Stasi or communist or totalitarian regimes, they try- so the institution of the family or marriage is a threat to totalitarian regimes, right? Because you want everyone to love Dear Leader, or to love the state, you don't want them to have intimate connections. Or if you look at the Kibbutzes that I talk about this in Blueprint, they were like, okay, we're committed to equality between men and women. We want everyone to work together. So we're going to take the kids out of their parents household. They're going to be raised in a communal environment. It works at most for one generation and then is abandoned because the people love their children. It's a very natural tendency to love your children. And so the Communist Party in China or in Russia that tries to stop - and Marx writes about this and Engels actually he and Marx had a big conflict about this - tries to stop a commitment to the family is doomed, in my judgment, to failure, because our love of our family is just so innate and necessary for our survival.
Nicholas Christakis: And the Stasi tried to decrease friendship, right? They tried to make everyone afraid of everyone else, right. Your friend could be informing on you. 50% of East Germans were informants. So now I don't know whether I can trust my. I can't talk to my own friends in the way that Shmully was describing that wonderful way. Those political arrangements that seek to stop these innate things, and I'll come to free speech now, won't work in my judgment, because they are swimming against the tide. So when you think about our First Amendment rights in this country, which include assembly and free expression, those are actually, in my judgment, founded on- freedom of assembly is founded on you get to choose who you want to be, your friends, right? The state can't tell you, no, you can't hang out with these people. That's not going to work. A sound state arrangement will not work if it prevents you from hanging out who you want. And remember, I mentioned teaching earlier. Teaching is free speech. In order for me to be able to teach you something, there has to be a free flow of ideas in a society. A society that tries to stop the flow of information, is not a functional society and will not endure, is my argument, because the flow of information is actually essential to our survival. So while Blueprint is not intended as nor should it be seen as a prescriptive system for how to organize a good society, I do believe that those types of political arrangements that try to stop these fundamental aspects are doomed to failure.
Nicholas Christakis: I'll give you one more example. The love that, in a heterosexual situation, the love that men feel for women and women feel for men was a threat to many communitarian movements in the in- actually throughout history, but especially in the 19th century in the United States and then in the 20th century. So the communitarian movements went one of two directions then. Either they became they they were seen so that they became completely celibate, like the shakers, and say, you're going to be loyal to the shakers. Therefore, you cannot have an intimate relationship with a partner. So no sex or polyamory. So you're not going to have a particular partner. You can have sex with anyone you want, right? So the irony is that both of those, the no sex solution and the polyamory solutions are both trying to solve the same problem, which is that people love their partners and they're going to put their partners ahead of the community, right. So these norms arise repeatedly across history and always fail. Right. There is no sustained society which has been able to organize itself in these fashions that stops the sentimental attachment that people have for their partners. Anyway, this is all discussed in Blueprint. Did I answer your question or no?
Victor Agbafe: Yes you did. Yeah, excellently. And my second question is.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, good.
Victor Agbafe: You-
Nicholas Christakis: And then I'm going to tell you my Bill Sapphire story. Someone remind me to tell my Bill Safire story. Go on.
Victor Agbafe: You know, you talk about, you know, the evolutionary, right, kind of origins and explanations for, like, love and friendship. And Shmully really talks a lot about, like, our social fabric, I feel like, and like how it's frayed. Something that I've been thinking about is like how, I guess technology. I think in sapiens, the point is made maybe agriculture. How did it kind of, like, affect us before we gained control of it? You could argue technology is having that same effect. What advice would you give us in terms of how we navigate our lives?
Nicholas Christakis: Well, it's so hard for me because I struggle with this a lot because I'm definitely a technophile. I'm not a Luddite. I think that anyone that's trying to argue against technological advances is not only not going to succeed, but also, I think is probably wrong. So I'm afraid of AI, but I am getting a grip on my fear and coming to believe that it's likely, like any other technological advance in the past and ultimately will be a net benefit. So on- But I do believe that this technology can be harmful for sure. And certainly people earlier mentioned online pornography, but also just the whole whole Instagram, the whole Facebook, the whole TikTok kind of way of being is, I think, deeply harmful. I think Jonathan Haidt is right about this, so I am worried about it. I'm not like a sunny, you know, Panglossian kind of, you know, it's going to be fine. Never you worry. The best of all possible worlds. But I don't think it's practical to to argue against it. And I had one other thing to say about the technology and what was it? I forgot. Oh, Bill Safire. Floating third point.
Nicholas Christakis: Actually, this is a good example of that. So he- I didn't agree with his politics at all, but he wrote a very funny column in the back of the New York Times Magazine when I was at your age called on language at the end, which I read religiously every week. It was very funny kind of examination of etymology and so forth. And as he got older, he found it very difficult to- people would ask three part questions. They would say, Mr. Safire, I have three questions one, two and three. And he couldn't remember the three. And so he would answer the first question and answer the second. By the time he got to the third question, he could no longer remember it. And this happened repeatedly. So he finally developed a heuristic, which was Bill Safire's floating third point, which was an answer you could make to any third question, which is there are no easy answers. And you could watch him do it. He would say, and the first point. Yes. And the second point is my answer. And the third point, there are no easy answers. And then he did this routinely, and I find myself doing the same thing now, you know-.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I thought somebody asked me what his wife's name was.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes. Exactly. As a third question. What's your wife's name? Well, yes. There are no easy answers.
Ben Harland: Can you talk about your research in mobs and particularly the aftermath of a mob in a given community? Just like-
Nicholas Christakis: Haven't done research myself in mobs, but I've done research on many collective action phenomena. Okay. One of my favorite. This is a subtle example. It's not exactly about a mob, but it's about- so if you think about when you have an aversive experience, and actually this may apply to Judaism, now that I think about it. When you have an aversive experience, you learn from that aversive experience, right? You know, you put your hand in the fire, it burns, you learn something. But how do collectivities learn something? Why does the Jewish faith reduce both the winning and wanting argument to the text? You know, why do we preserve both arguments? Why are we the people of the book? You know, why do we privilege human capital? Because we've been victims of pogroms and we've fled repeatedly. And, you know, we need portable wealth. And knowledge is portable wealth. So, so communities can come culturally for sure. Or like, why do the Afghanis have a kind of crazy culture that they do? Well, if you've been invaded for thousands of years, eventually, you adopt a set of strategies which make you very unappealing to invade and actually successful, if you think about it. So we look at them and say, how do violent people with all these crazy ideas. Yeah. But you know, from Alexander the Great to the Brits to the Russians, to the Americans, nobody can succeed in Afghanistan.
Nicholas Christakis: So they must be doing something right. You know, so one of the things we've studied is how the network structure of a group may encode valuable information. So as background to this, let me cultivate in your mind the following metaphor. As you all studied in high school chemistry, you can take carbon atoms and assemble them one way and you get graphite, which is soft and dark, or you take the same carbon atoms and assemble them another way, and you get diamond, which is hard and clear. And there are two key intellectual ideas there. First of all, these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness aren't properties of the carbon atoms, they're properties of the collection of carbon atoms. And second, which properties you get depends on how you connect the carbon atoms to each other. Take the same carbon atoms, connect them one way, you get one set of properties. Connect them another way, you get a completely different set of properties. And it's the same with human groups. I can take you guys as I taught in class today, and I can connect you one way, and you're really sweet to each other, or I take you same people and arrange you in a different topological fashion who's connected to who and you're mean sons of bitches to each other. Therefore, these properties of kindness and meanness are not just properties of individuals or even aggregations of individuals.
Nicholas Christakis: They are emergent properties from the pattern of connections of individuals, from the topological architecture, of how the ties are done. Now, with that background, imagine you're a group of people who've repeatedly had to flee, for example, in the communities that are formed after natural disaster. Like the example, one of the examples we use as a model is coastal villages in Japan that have repeated tsunamis. So the tsunami comes. The people flee inland. Some people die, some survive, they learn from the experience. And another tsunami comes 100 years later or 50 years later. After a while, the social arrangements, the topology, the architecture of the connections of the people may encode valuable information about how this group can endure when stricken by a tsunami. So it's not just the knowledge in our brains that has been reshaped by this stressful experience, the pattern of our connections. We've arranged ourselves like diamond instead of carbon because we're repeatedly hit by tsunamis. You guys never get tsunamis, so you are like carbon instead of diamond. Do you understand what I'm saying? So the structure of the networks can encode information. I think this is what you asked me, isn't it? Or no- you asked me. What did you. Oh, you asked me. Communities that face challenges. What was your question?
Guest: Yeah, yeah. Mob.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah. Mob. So I think that after there may be a relic. Oh, and I remember something I was going to say earlier, which I'll come back to. There may be - I remember now what I was going to say - a relic of mobs. There may be an echo in the social fabric after the formation of a mob that can be worrisome. Going back to what you guys said earlier, one thing I wanted to mention about the technology. You asked me- who asked me about the technology? So the technology issue, I think is only going to be an issue that my answer only holds for, let's say, 100 years, but over longer time periods, actually, things could be very different. And my favorite example of this, which is also discussed in Blueprint, is the gene culture coevolution example of the domestication of milk producing animals. Does anyone know this example? Oh good. This is a fun example to teach. So think about this. How many of you can drink milk tolerably? Pretty much all of you. Now, that's very weird, actually, because up until 10,000 years ago, no adult could. Why? Because you only drank milk when you were an infant, and then you were weaned. And then you never drank milk again for the rest of your life after you were weaned. So you had an enzyme in your intestines called lactase that digests the primary sugar of milk, which is lactose.
Nicholas Christakis: And that enzyme was expressed while you were a baby and then stopped being expressed thereafter because it would be wasteful. Your body, any humans that needlessly were producing lactase for their whole lives would be disadvantaged compared to the humans that stopped the production of lactase after they were babies. So in fact, all humans until about 10,000 years ago had sort of lactase non persistence. The lactase stopped being produced in their bodies around the time babies were typically weaned. Is everyone with me still? And then what happens? Multiple times between 3 and 9000 years ago in multiple parts of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily also around the Levant, humans domesticate milk producing animals: camels, sheep, goats, cows, and so on. Suddenly, because of this historical cultural product, namely this technology, the domestication of animals, we change our environment and there's now milk in our environment. Previously, there was no milk in our environment. Now there is milk in our environment. Those among us, therefore, who had a mutation that allowed the lactase to persist into adulthood, gained an advantage over those who did not produce lactase into adulthood. Because we could now have another source of food, we could drink the milk and a source of hydration during times of water being spoiled. The deep lesson from this story is that something that humans did changed the course of our evolution. We, humans, with our technology and our history and our culture, change the environment and then over a period of a few thousand years, change the trajectory of our evolution, such that most people on the planet today can digest lactose, which was not possible before.
Nicholas Christakis: Well, I think there actually, once you begin to think about this, there are many examples of this actually. So, for example, I think we may be becoming more myopic since the invention of glasses, someone like me would have not reproduced. Maybe you to, you know, 10,000 years ago we would have been eaten by lions. Now we can survive. Okay, so certainly modern medicine is doing that. Modern medicine is curing people who otherwise would have died, who would have had, let's say, genetic defects, who would have been weaned out. I think climate change is like this. I think the human beings, we are changing the climate of the planet. I think in 5000 years, the kinds of humans that are alive then will have a different genetic profile than the kinds of humans that would have been alive had we not changed the environment with climate change. Okay. And there are many examples of this. For example, there's a very famous example of the groups that migrated to the Tibetan highlands from China. They evolved the capacity to produce a certain kind of hemoglobin that was really good for these low oxygen tension environments up in the Himalayas. So this cultural behavior, which was we're going to settle the high mountains, we're going to invent clothing that allows us to live in this cold place. But now there's not a lot of oxygen there.
Nicholas Christakis: But slowly but surely, those among us who have mutations that allow us to cope more effectively with the low oxygen environment survive and changes the course of evolution. So people now believe that historical innovations and technological innovations may actually operate over historical time periods, which is mind boggling. And usually in animals it takes 30 generations to change the animal, not to a new species, but to change its expression. So 30 generations in humans is about 1000 years. So I think that there's actually a lot more of this than we realize. Some people speculate that people that grow up in languages that privilege sounds like Chinese like that people- Chinese has been spoken for at least 5000 years and is a tonal language. Some people believe that people who grow up in that environment hear sounds differently than, let's say I do and and have been selected because the people that could express themselves using this language over the thousands of years that this has been the cultural product. So this is very speculative. But some people believe this. So, so, yes. So I think technology so the social media technology that we make or the argument about the why Ashkenazi are so smart, you know, the argument. No, I mean, this is a prohibited topic, but I'm sure it's true. Why are the Ashkenazi so smart? One thing says, well, the Catholics, the Catholic priests didn't reproduce whereas the rabbis had lots of children.
Nicholas Christakis: The rabbis said so the smartest, most learned people had more children. So there's a lot of speculation about the Ashkenazi advantage, which, by the way, we were talking earlier about- the bell shaped distribution also gives you more Tay-Sachs disease. So you get a more people at the top. Yes, there's lots of complications and it's very speculative and so forth. But I think it's probably true, actually. So if you create a society which privileges the written word and we know books have become, I think the human language capacities in a cultural environment such as all humans have created with the printed word. Well, we invent written languages five or some odd thousand years ago, but they become widely available beyond the priestly class just in the last few hundred years. I think the people that are alive in a thousand years will be very different than they would have been had we not invented printed language. Oral language is very normal. We all, hundreds of thousands of years we've been speaking. But writing is not a natural skill and reading is not natural at all. So I think if you think about the challenges that kids that are dyslexic face and you just think about being in a world where the printed word is so important, it's got to be a disadvantage to be handicapped in terms of reading printed words. So, so anyway, so I think there are many cultural innovations that are going to shape our evolutionary trajectory.
Trevor Mckay: Nicholas, I've been on the edge of my seat the whole time and been dying to ask a pair of questions. So the audience allows it. I'll ask two, please.
Nicholas Christakis: They're not three, so I think I can cope.
Trevor Mckay: Firstly, I'm really fascinated as to how you explain things at a fundamental level. So one thing that's Shmully mentioned when we kind of did the Around the Horn about our friends is that we also have to be cognizant of, you know, people that have malintent.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Trevor Mckay: And I guess from a biological standpoint, the question I have is, is how do we see this perpetuation of like, evil or malicious acts extending millennia?
Nicholas Christakis: Well, I don't have an explanation for evil. Satan. I mean, I don't know, you know, what the origins of evil are. And but I can tell you that we just have a paper that's under review right now at PNAS, at the proceedings of the National Academy on the origins of interpersonal antagonism. So why earlier we talked about the evolutionary origins of friendship. So all of you have- every one of you has had the feeling of being in the company of your friends. And, you know, that kind of warm feeling you get, you know, your heart rate goes down, you just feel good in the company of your friends. Right. That whole physiologic response that you have to being in the company of your friends. That evolved. You evolve to have that good reward, to feel good when you're in the company of your friends, because you're more likely to survive when you're with your posse, when you're with your friends. So anything that made you want to stay with your friends, we would have evolved this capacity. And we did. Okay, fine. But why? Why do we also feel antagonism towards our enemies? It's one thing to provide an explanation for our capacity for friendship but I ignored earlier our capacity for antagonism. Well, I think actually that, paradoxically, there may be some benefits to antagonism. And I'm not talking about having enemies. I agree completely with Shmully. It's important to know who your enemies are. But we don't just track our friends, we track our enemies and we remember who our enemies are and why do we devote the brainpower to doing that? Well, part of it is self-preservation. But then why do we even have the capacity for enemies? And part of it has to do, in my judgment, in my opinion, with these repulsive forces within an otherwise attractive system, restructure the system in a way that may improve its overall performance.
Nicholas Christakis: In other words, if you imagine this group of people only having friendly connections, we would arrange ourselves one way. But if we just had 2 or 3 unfriendly connections, like everyone was friendly here except you didn't like her and he didn't like him and he didn't like her. Those three antagonistic ties, the arrangement we would put ourselves in might be a little bit different. That structure would be a little bit different, and that difference could be helpful to the group as a whole, actually. So one way is that these just to give a specific example, having some antagonism reduces echo chambers of information. If anyone was always ever deeply friendly with only the people that were immediately around them, then there would be less movement of novel information through the system. But you guys are all friends with each other, by and large, except you don't like him, and they're all friends with each other, and he doesn't like you. So these two groups are moved apart a little bit, so they have the opportunity to discover information that via the friendly connections spread to you. But you're not all the same group that only has redundant information. They are exploring a different region of the information space, acquiring information because they have slightly repulsed from you so they're in a different part. And then now the useful information can come to you, ironically, because of the mild levels of antagonism in the system.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I just want to add something to this, because I think the question is great and I'd love your answer.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: There's something naturally comfortable about being among friends, you said. And you know, from an evolutionary perspective or just a social perspective, we survive well among friends. So it's easy to play with my friends as opposed to, you know, the antagonist or the enemy. It's interesting that in the Bible, there's actually a commandment, one of the 613 commandments, which we say every.
Nicholas Christakis: One of which commandments?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So there are 613 commandments in the Old Testament, 248 positive and 365 negative. Now about half of them are not applicable today because we don't have the temple. And a lot of the commandments were dealt with, just the sacrifices and the ritual that was performed during temple times and in certain agricultural laws. But we follow a few hundred 300 commandments in the Torah. If you're following the Torah as a traditional Jew, those are the- anybody who told you about ten, that's kind of a shortcut anyway. But one of the commandments in the Torah.
Nicholas Christakis: I'm all about heuristics Shmully. 300 commandments sounds a bit rough for me. I'll stick with the ten.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Well, think about how many laws you have, how many laws you follow every day in America. Like those laws?
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, but I don't know the laws.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Right? Oh, well most Jews don't know all the laws.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, they don't- but they don't follow them innately?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Well, you're supposed to study them and learn them which is another another discussion.
Nicholas Christakis: Anyway. Go on.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. It's interesting when you talk about friends and enemies, is that there's one of the commandments in the Torah, which we actually recite every day after we pray in the morning is to remember Amalek, who is the epitome of the enemy. Of the nation of Amalek that swarmed and attacked the Jewish people when they came out of Egypt on their way to freedom and becoming a nation. Amalek had a particular nature. It was very antagonistic, and it attacked the Jewish people. And every day after we pray in the morning, we say that God commands us to to remember the nation of Amalek, what it represents.
Nicholas Christakis: Wasn't this controversial like a month or two ago, after October 7th? It came up somehow, right?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Oh, yeah. Because, because because.
Nicholas Christakis: I didn't know what the reference was. Now I know the reference.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Netanyahu said that Hamas is the is the modern descendant of maybe even literally- Excuse me?
Guest: He said maybe instead of instantiation.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Instantiation of Amalek. And therefore they have to they have to be removed from the universe the way.
Nicholas Christakis: Oh, right. Yeah. To be wiped out or something.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: But the eradication of Amalek starts with remembering a moment. What's interesting to note just thinking listening to you respond to this question is that we don't have a similar commandment to remember any particular nation friend. And I think, you know, you ask yourself why there are so many nations that were good to the Jews, right? Why don't we say every day after our prayer, to.
Nicholas Christakis: Remember our friends.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Remember our friends? And, you know, at a simple level, you could argue that, you know, there's a lot of friends and there's maybe there's one particular enemy, right? And so but that would be one possible answer. The eradication of Amalek is also, you know, what is it going to say to remember your friend and preserve them or enhance them. But I think it's maybe something that we're talking about tonight in your dialogue, which is, it's a lot easier to forget your- we don't want to remember the enemies. We don't want to believe that they exist. That's the natural state.
Nicholas Christakis: I'm very interested now in the history and the archaeology of this group. Who were these people?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The Amalekites.
Nicholas Christakis: Where were they and who were they?
Eli Tadmor: So they had no evidence but not because it's not there like this. That this part of the Levant is extremely complicated, very hard to see ethnic definition. So we have the biblical evidence, but we don't because everyone in the era wrote on perishable materials, we wouldn't know that they were there.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yes. Let me, let me, let me just let me double down on that. There's no evidence that there were Jews either in that period. There's only- there's no archaeological evidence of there being Jews in Egypt.
Nicholas Christakis: Well, yet the Assyrians wrote about Atreides.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. No, no, no.
Nicholas Christakis: Atreus. They wrote.
Eli Tadmor: That's the Hittites.
Nicholas Christakis: The Hittites. I'm sorry. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah. The Hittites.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So I'm not.
Nicholas Christakis: Not Atreides. I'm sorry. Atreus. Yeah. Not not
Nicholas Christakis: Called them. Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. I'm not going to give you the archaeological answer for which there's no evidence because there's no evidence of a lot of things in archaeology. So but if you want to know what the Torah is teaching us.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What the Bible is telling us and about this nation is that when the Jews came out of Egypt, there was a nation that first of all attacked us, as in the desert.
Nicholas Christakis: Between the Red Sea and Israel.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Egypt and the Land of the and Sinai, and coming into the Promised Land. Right. For which there's also no archaeological evidence that Jews were ever in the desert. So there's or maybe there is some.
Nicholas Christakis: I thought there was some in Sinai.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: But I'm not here to give you an archaeological answer.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Give you the answer.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Of the- what the lesson in the Torah is and who this nation is and what it represents. And then he can spend the rest of his five PhDs figuring out where the evidence. I'm sorry.
Guest: Saying.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Not. I didn't say anything but nonsense. I said, if you want to spend your life dedicated, you're an archaeologist. I'm a Rabbi. I'm going to give you the answer.
Nicholas Christakis: Okay.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What is Amalek? Who is Amalek? Amalek was the nation of the Jewish people who came out of the land of Israel, out of Egypt, and were on their way to freedom, mocked, mocked the nation. And what we're taught is what they did was the Jews were experiencing liberation. It was a euphoric moment in our formation as a people. We had seen God do miraculous things for us. And Amalek comes along and he says, oh, you know, it's just a coincidence, it's serendipity, it's an accident. There's no God. The things you are assuming are miracles, are delusions. And so the core of Amelek is
Nicholas Christakis: Skepticism.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Is skepticism. It's the cast doubt in your mind. It's that when you see something and you embrace it and you love it and you appreciate it, he comes along and he throws that little ounce of cynicism into it to really break down your worldview and does it in a very deceptive and sardonic, really. Excuse me?
Guest: Insidious.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Insidious way. And so that is what our monolith represents. And that's the core of all evil. It's the person who comes along and almost pops the illusion, right? That you have a perception that you've lived with maybe for centuries or you could argue it's very empirical, it's very real. And Shmully comes along and says, oh, maybe it's not so real. It's a very dangerous psychological state.
Nicholas Christakis: It's also very Jewish, actually.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. It is in an ironic way. Sometimes our enemies are close to us.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: They're kind of, you know, maybe it's your best friend or your next door neighbor. So yeah, I agree. Amalek was right there. You know, he was the first confrontation. It's like, you know, it's the client lawyer relationship. You know, I always, when lawyers sue me, if they're good, I always tell them, you know, what are you doing when you're not suing me? I actually have to sue somebody else. Why don't you come work with me? So that's how you find that the lawyers are. And they're really good on the other side. You pick them up but. But that is what it represents. And so Amalek in the physical sense, Amalek waged war with the Jews. Amalek in the psychological state is doubt. And you have to- the Torah tells us to remember this enemy, because we all have. What's our biggest problem with anything when we aspire to success? It's the inhibition.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The fear to do it, it's like, oh, I can't do this. Oh I can't, right? You doubt yourself. When you doubt yourself and you doubt your reality, you're blocked and you're locked out. You have to believe first in yourself. And that's what God is telling us. Zakhor Es Ahser Asa Licha Amelek. Remember what Amalek did for you. You were a nation of slaves, and you came into a desert. And you go on your way to the Promised land and Amalek wanted to come along. And really, he wanted to take it down, to demolish that conviction you have as a believer and not only you have to remember I'm alive, but it has to be eradicated. You have to remember first. You have to know identify that skepticism, whether it's internal or external, and then you have to eradicate it. And we don't want to- we kind of cast that blame of the inner skeptic on others. We always put it on circumstances. We always have someone else to cast to that when, in essence, it's coming from myself.
Guest: And so what we do is we say, oh no, there's a legitimate reason for me to doubt that I can do this, when in reality there's no legitimate reason. It's just you saying, I can't do it. And so what the philosophy here that God is saying is Zakhar, Es Asher Asa remember Amalek. Don't deny that it's out there. This universal enemy, this particular Amelek enemy that this Amelek which is within each and every one of us, which is this cast of doubt that it's inside of us. And so we tried to, you know, we put it into a box and we move it away and blame the reason why we're not going to do what we have to do on something else, when in reality it is that within each of us you have to remember that, to know it, to identify it. And I think people we don't want to because it's very uncomfortable. It's a lot easier to go to the therapist, to take the pill. I mean, let's talk reality. We- the pill, the alcohol, the psychedelics, the doctor, the therapist, is a lot easier than actually dealing with the essence and the core of of the problem.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So the the enemy within has to be identified first. And if you and we want shortcuts, we want faster, simpler ways to solve these existential crises, the existential problems. And that's why every morning you have to get up in the morning and say, remember Amelek, whether it's the Amalek of history, whether it's the Amalek today in Gaza, whether it's the Amalek inside, every one of us, know that it's there, remember it, face it, confront it, don't deny it, and don't blame it on something else. And don't try to make pretend it's not there. It's there, and it's very real. Why is there evil in the world? I don't know why it is in the world. Because God created the world. Just goes back to the beginning of everything. He talks about why God created the world of of good and evil. Is this adversity? Of course, if there was a world of good, there would be no purpose of existence. It's to determine the human being is born into the world to determine the distinction.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: That's what- you talk about evolution, evolution, evolution. I mean, we are human beings. We're created. And I'm just going to throw in a little, you know, a little bit of another perspective on the universe. We're creating the image of God, which is what the Bible tells us, teaches us that- how are we different, that we deal with good and evil? An animal doesn't deal with good and evil. There's no sense of good and evil. It's survival. It's food, sex and go forward. Anything to survive. The human being gets up and says, wait a second, is that a good thing? Is it good for me? Is it good for the world? Is it good for humanity? Is it good for society? Is it good for civilization? Is it good for the climate? Is it good for the planet? Is it good for the universe? And so when we look at the world that way, that's what makes us human beings. How could we ever want to live in a world that's, you know, talk about binary. You know, it's how could we ever want to live in a world that was one or the other, that we would have no reason to get up in the morning stronger after adversity? I mean, your whole life is about making these distinctions, working in a hospice, your mother dying at 25.
Guest: Your father leaving the house. Two adopted siblings. I mean, think about those things. How they made you who you are and how much you've given to the world because of those things that inspired you. Most of them were very dark moments. I mean, if I could go through your last two hours, they were actually the terrible things that happened in your life that made you who you are today. Those terrible things that wouldn't have happened to you and to all of us. Who would we be today? So it's easy to forget that, to put them aside. Zachor es asher asa licha Amelek. We know who our friends are. We love our friends. You'll have more, you'll have less. Some of them will stick around. Some of them won't stick around. It's also very important every day to remember that unfortunately, there's the other side, and denying it or burying it is only going to make it come back in ways much, much worse because it doesn't go away and why God created that. The world that is for us to deal with.
Nicholas Christakis: Well I think the eradication of our enemies and the search for the enemy within, these are all very important ideas. One idea I would add to that which is related, but not the same idea, is why, for example, in martial arts you bow to your opponent.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Before the fight, or.
Nicholas Christakis: Both. You bow to your opponent. You're grateful for your opponent because it's been through combat with your opponent that you become better. And it's the same with J.S. Mills. You know, he who knows only his only side. He who knows only his side of the argument knows little of it. We should welcome critique and disagreement. That's how we get better.
Guest: Of course.
Nicholas Christakis: Our argument gets better. And when we subject it to the criticism of people who actually oppose it.
Guest: Let's bring that back to Yale.
Nicholas Christakis: Well, I mean, inshallah, you know, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The dialectic.
Nicholas Christakis: Yes. You know, I could actually stay up a long time still. Well, I have a bunch of things to do, but I can't even believe it's 11:00 and I. You- just as you predicted. I wouldn't want to end the evening. But yeah-.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You have to. And don't apologize for it. I want you to know that we soft close once or twice a week, every single week in this room at 9:30. And I can tell you that on almost every night at 9:30, this place soft closes. If it's 11:00 and not one person has got up.
Nicholas Christakis: Yeah, well.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: It's evidence of how great this was.
Nicholas Christakis: Well, thank you so much for giving me.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: One further announcement. So this was one of a series of ten autobiographical talks that. Thank you very, very, very much. Thank you. That was awesome.
Nicholas Christakis: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all very much. It was a great, great evening. And thank you. Yeah, a little bit too, too much, too much attention on me. But thank you.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. So if you're under the age of 40 or a rabbi, please take one plate with you.